


kings of the synthetic clock garden

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bodyswap, Canon Timeline, M/M, Magical Realism, Psychological Drama, Soulmates, Time Travel, not your typical bodyswap, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-10-10 04:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 46,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10429014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: After his parents' death, all Mike wants is for everything to be different. Harvey, on the other hand, is pretty sure this is all in his head.Time travel body swap AU. Loosely based on the plot ofKimi no Na wa.





	1. himself

He doesn’t remember the dream, but reverberations of it linger in his stomach, in his chest as he wakes. It’s a heavy feeling, a sort of dread he’s never felt before; like getting out of bed the morning after losing the Championships and waiting for the first person to say “There’s always next year, pal,” but about a million times worse.

Harvey curls up tighter, pulling the blanket close around his shoulders.

Today is going to be a bad day.

Someone knocks gently on the bedroom door.

“Michael? Are you awake?”

No, Harvey wants to say. No, I’m not awake, but I don’t know how I know that because I’m asleep and when you’re asleep you always dream that you’re awake, and also who’s Michael?

“Yeah,” he calls in a too-high voice not his own that makes him clutch with too-long fingers at his too-thin throat. The door opens and an old woman sticks her head into the room; she has a sympathetic expression on her face, and the heavy feeling gets heavier.

“Trevor was asking after you,” the old woman says. “He called last night after you’d gone to bed.”

Harvey pulls the blanket up over his head, and the old woman sighs.

(Who are you?)

“He wanted to know if you were going to be free this afternoon,” she goes on. “I told him I didn’t know if you had any plans, but he could ask you when he saw you at school.”

(Where am I?)

Something is wrong, something is terribly, disgustingly wrong. Doesn’t she know that? And she wants him to go to _school?_

“I don’t wanna go,” Harvey mutters, pushing his face into the pillows.

He hears footsteps as the old woman comes into the room and sits beside him on the bed. Placing her hand on his back, she strokes lightly down his spine; whatever the heaviness is, she feels it too. He knows she does.

“I know,” she says. “I don’t blame you. But I think it might help to see your friends, and to get out of the house for a little while; if you don’t feel well, you can come right back here, but I think you should try.”

Harvey sniffs (the pillow doesn’t smell right, doesn’t smell like him) and looks up, out of his cocoon. The old woman is smiling sadly; she seems nice.

(What am I doing here?)

“Will you walk me to the bus stop?” he asks, and she pets his shoulder.

“Of course. But you have to get dressed if you’re going to catch the bus, come on now.”

Shoving the blanket down, Harvey shuffles to his knees, accidentally kicking the old woman, but she only pats his shin and gets up, leaving him alone.

The bed is soft, pillows piled along the wall to form a nest, a little couch to make up for the room’s smallness. Harvey puts his feet on the floor—carpet, worn flat—and looks out the window across the way, but it’s not much of a view. All he sees is a brick wall with a little window, the side of another house or something. Maybe an apartment building.

Beside the window is a desk, that cheap honey-colored wood with rounded edges that everyone seems to have even though Harvey’s never seen it in any stores. Textbooks are piled off to the side, the pages still crisp, and one called _Common Core Math Workouts Grade 6_ is wrapped in plastic. Michael must be smart if he doesn’t need to study, or stupid if he needs to and doesn’t.

Harvey walks over to the dresser at the foot of the bed, the same rounded honey wood as the desk (maybe part of a set), and opens the drawer closest to his eye level. The topmost shirt, stuffed in unfolded, is a grey tee; Harvey puts it on and hunts through the other drawers for underwear and maybe some jeans.

He spies a pair of black Converse in the corner.

Harvey knows Michael’s type.

Michael is a slacker. Michael isn't the star of his school’s baseball team, like Harvey is, and he isn’t hoping to get into some great college on a big shiny scholarship, even though he could use it, probably; he’d get one if his parents told him to, but he wouldn’t brag about it or tell his friends. He likes to wear plain shirts and common sneakers and blend into the background, to slip under the radar, to coast.

Coasting is lazy.

Harvey hates people who coast.

He’s not going to fix Michael’s life for him; Michael doesn’t deserve it.

Picking up a backpack by the desk, he slides it over his shoulders and, at the last second, picks up a spiral notebook—blank, he realizes as he flips through it—and shoves a cheap Bic into his pocket. Hopefully Michael doesn’t have some kind of reputation for Harvey to ruin by not paying attention in class; even if he has, it isn’t Harvey’s responsibility to keep it up.

None of this is real, after all.

He goes out of the room and turns to the left. Downstairs, beside the front door, the old woman waits, looking out the window.

Harvey steps up beside her; the light in the hall is a little yellow, and outside a little grey. The front yard is small but well-kept, recently mown and relatively free of weeds except for a few dandelions. A girl with dark blonde hair dawdles at the end of the walk, chancing a look every now and again toward the house.

Harvey reaches up to clutch the straps of his backpack.

“Am I dreaming?”

The old woman closes her eyes and Harvey watches as a few tears drip down her cheeks. He didn’t think it was such a sad question.

She sighs.

“Let’s get going.”

Harvey follows her out the door; when the blonde girl waves at him, he waves back, but she keeps her distance.

On the bus, there are six other kids who look about his age, and none of them will look him in the eye.

In the schoolyard, Harvey leans against the red double doors and watches his classmates walk past; finally, a boy he doesn’t recognize thumps him on the back and smiles as though everything is going to be alright in the future, even though it isn’t now. Harvey didn’t know there was a specific smile for that, but the boy has it.

“Wanna ditch?” the boy asks, and this must be Trevor.

Harvey nods, so Trevor jerks his head out toward the road and points with his thumb; Harvey follows him down the street and around the corner, and they walk a long road with a sign that reads “77 Av.”

The houses look sort of funny; none of them are quite the same, not even the ones that seem to be attached.

“Dude,” Trevor says awkwardly, shoving his hands in his pockets and raising his shoulders almost to his ears.

Harvey looks at him askance; whatever’s going on, whatever this awful thing is, Trevor isn’t dealing with it well.

He doesn’t like Trevor. If Michael knows what’s good for him, they won’t be friends after middle school.

Trevor puffs out his cheeks. “Uh…”

“What?” Harvey asks coldly, and Trevor drops his shoulders.

“I mean.”

Harvey watches as Trevor looks away and chews on his lip.

“I’m sorry, man.”

Maybe Michael would appreciate hearing that, but Harvey’s so frustrated that he wants to deck him. He grunts in response, a terse noise that could read either indignant or accepting, and he just knows that Trevor will take it the wrong way.

Trevor smiles, and Harvey walks faster.

“Dude,” Trevor calls, jogging to catch up. “Hey, I wanted—uh, I wanted to ask you, you know, do you want me to… Uh, can I go to the funeral?” He frowns, glaring at his feet. “I mean, do you want me to? Like, would that be cool?”

That’s not what he meant.

Harvey wonders who died; Michael's grandpa, maybe.

“No,” he says.

If Trevor had to ask, then he doesn’t have any reason to assume the answer should be anything else, unless he thinks he’s entitled to it.

“Oh,” Trevor says quietly; he was expecting something different.

Harvey really doesn’t like him.

They walk on in silence until they reach an overpass, and Trevor turns to wander through the prop fixtures to a set of train tracks. Harvey wonders what would happen if he pushed Trevor onto them, if he would really die or just pretend.

“Is it ‘cause your grandma doesn’t like me?” Trevor asks.

Harvey wants to say no, wants to end this guy’s friendship with Michael even though he doesn’t have the right, even though Trevor and Michael probably go way back and Harvey would probably hate Michael himself if he met him in real life. He wants to say it’s because _he_ doesn’t like Trevor, because Trevor is trying to insert himself somewhere Harvey doesn’t think he belongs and he won’t listen when Harvey tells him no and he asked if going to a funeral would be “cool” and he called Harvey “Dude.”

“Yeah,” Harvey says, and Trevor laughs under his breath.

“Figures,” he mutters.

Harvey leans against a prop fixture and sticks his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans.

“I wanna go home,” he mumbles, staring off into the distance and hoping it’s something Michael would do so no one will suspect. Trevor nods, and Harvey figures he’s getting by okay.

“Yeah,” Trevor says, “sure. You want me to go with you?”

Harvey doesn’t remember how to get back to the bus stop.

“Okay,” he says.

This time he walks a few paces behind Trevor, who does the smart thing and doesn’t point it out.

Finally, they reach the bus stop, and instead of leaving, Trevor looks down the street into traffic for any sign of the next oncoming Q29 (according to the schedule posted on the wooden utility pole advertising the stop). Harvey doesn’t tell him to go, but he leans against the pole and pulls the blank notebook out of his backpack.

“Hey,” Trevor offers then, turning around to look at Harvey sincerely. “Your parents were, like…really cool. I mean. Really nice people.”

Oh. Okay then.

“Leave me alone,” Harvey bites out, clutching the pen in his pocket.

Trevor doesn’t look hurt or offended so much as angry, like he’s the one who’s been wronged here, and Harvey doesn’t have it in him to care.

“Whatever, man,” Trevor brushes him off; he only hangs around for another few seconds before this isn’t worth his time anymore and he walks back up the street toward the train tracks.

Asshole.

When the bus arrives, Harvey sits on the long bench in the back and stares down at the blank page before him, clutching the pen between his teeth. This is Michael’s notebook, Michael’s pen, Michael’s life and school and bus route. Michael’s recently deceased parents. Harvey should say something to him, something nice. Nicer than Trevor.

 _Hi Michael,_ he writes across the top of the third page. _I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry._

It’s not much, but it’s something.

Harvey wonders if Michael will ever read it. Probably not, so he might as well speak his mind.

 _Trevor is a moron,_ he writes next. _He wanted to come to the funeral and I said no. Your grandma seems nice though. I think she doesn’t like Trevor either, so I think she’s smart._

The bus stops, and Harvey looks out the window; there’s an ad outside that says “SUNY Be Part of Something Bigger.” So he’s probably somewhere in New York; he could ask Michael’s grandma, but then she would ask him questions he doesn’t have the answers to.

The bus starts moving again, and he taps the pen against the page.

_Do you like baseball? I do. I’m the starting pitcher on my school’s team. I’m going to be a ~~proffesional~~ professional when I grow up._

The bus rounds a corner and keeps driving; Harvey thinks he recognizes the funny-looking houses and he should probably get off soon.

He sighs and doodles a little square in the lower corner of the page.

_My name is Harvey._

That’s enough for now.

None of this is real, after all.

\---

There’s a book open on Mike’s desk; he doesn’t remember which one it is, the first thing he grabbed off the shelf. He’s read it before, it doesn’t matter.

There are so many bouquets of flowers in the living room, so many casseroles and brownie pans in the kitchen. Why does everyone think those things will help? Why is that all anyone knows how to do?

Tears begin to well up in his eyes, again, and he bites his tongue, hard, trying to will them back. He has to be strong. He’s gotta look out for Grammy because there’s no one else, no one left to do it. It’s gotta be him.

Well, but this is his room, with the lights off and the door closed. This is private.

Mike bites his lip and starts to cry.

Tomorrow, he’ll wake up and find out that none of this was real. It was just a terrible, terrible nightmare, a bad joke his brain is playing on him, a nasty idea someone planted.

Not really.

Mike presses his fists into his eyes and wishes harder than he’s ever wished before that everything was different.

_I don’t want to be here anymore._

Please?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mike (or, technically, Harvey) and Trevor go to (and ditch) [P.S./I.S. 113](http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/24/Q113/default.htm) in Queens, New York.
> 
> Just to be clear, this chapter is in medias res; the second section (Mike's POV) takes place the day before the first section (Harvey's POV).
> 
> Chapter titles from [Death Note](http://deathnote.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Death_Note_Chapters).
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com) if you like.


	2. reversal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first part of this chapter (Mike's POV) runs concurrent with the first part of the previous chapter (Harvey's POV).

Floating in darkness with no left right up down, no guiding pinprick of light to orient him, Mike wonders if this is what dying feels like. If this is what it felt like in that moment; if this is how they felt, or what they thought.

It isn’t so bad.

It isn’t.

Mike puts his hand out in front of him, he thinks, or maybe to the side; he can’t quite tell the shape of his own body in this space, this vacuum, this void.

“Where am I?” he asks, and the sound doesn’t echo as he expects it to.

There is nothing.

It isn’t so bad.

Then—something, a soft noise, indistinct, and he strains his ears to hear it better, even though he isn’t sure where to pay attention. A voice, it sounds like a voice.

“Remember?” the voice asks then, and no wonder he couldn’t find it; it comes from everywhere, all directions.

I don’t know, he wants to say, but his voice sounds strange in this place and he doesn’t want to hear himself try to speak again.

“You don’t remember me?” the voice asks more clearly, and no, no, Mike doesn’t. A boy, he thinks, a young man, unfamiliar but he _shouldn’t_ be, somehow, Mike _should_ know him (though he doesn’t, not at all).

“Harvey Specter,” except the tone is different this time, the same boy but stronger, deeper, more authoritative, playing from a different film strip, a different scene of the same movie, and Mike _should_ know him, _Harvey Specter,_ but he _doesn’t,_ he _doesn’t._

_I’m sorry._

The darkness doesn’t listen, the darkness doesn’t care, but it wraps Mike in its gentle cocoon and this is fine, all of it fine. He could stay here forever; emptiness and the voice of Harvey Specter, mysteries that don’t need solving, nothing he needs to think about and no one for him to lose.

_I’m sorry._

Mike wakes suddenly with the echoes of the voice, that voice still in his ears; there was a name, he knows there was, but it’s drifted away into the abyss, and it’s all meaningless anyway. Just a dream, senseless and irrational.

Hoping to calm his nerves, he takes a deep breath.

Immediately, he starts coughing. The breath was too deep or too shallow, somehow miscalculated—the windpipe too wide, maybe, or the muscles different, but this is _wrong,_ and his hands are too small, his fingers too thick, his arms too muscular, _wrong wrong wrong!_

When the coughing stops, finally, Mike scrambles from the bed (his bed?) and lurches toward the desk across the floor, the same honey-colored wood he’s used to but covered with all different stuff, and there’s a Red Sox pennant on the wall, and the books are all different, and the window faces a yard, and, and, and what’s going on, _what’s going on?_

“Wake! Up!”

Someone pounds on the bedroom door a few times and leaves without waiting for a response. Mike scrambles across the room, nearly tripping over his feet in his haste to throw the door open; another boy is wandering down the hall, his hands clasped behind his head and a baffled expression on his face when he looks back over his shoulder.

“Are you sick or something?” the boy asks. “The bus is gonna be here in like…five minutes.”

None of that makes sense.

Mike stares for a moment too long, and the boy creeps toward him, holding his hand out as though Mike is a wild animal.

“Harvey? You okay?”

What?

“Boys!” a woman’s voice echoes, and the stranger jerks his head around nervously. “Boys, are you ready to go? The bus is just down the street, come on now!”

The boy flees, and Mike turns to scan the room for a dresser or something. There’s nothing; a door that might be a closet, probably, but there’s no time for that now. Grabbing a shirt off the back of the desk chair and a pair of jeans from the floor, Mike yanks them on as he hops out of the room, spotting the other boy by the front door.

“Harvey, where’s your backpack?” the woman’s voice berates him, but Mike and the boy are out the door already, hustling onto the bus (BIGELOW MIDDLE SCHOOL, Mike reads along the side) before she can make a scene over it.

Mike heads to the back and sits by the window.

What the hell is going on? Where is he? Who is that boy, and why did he call Mike “Harvey”? For that matter, who was that woman? Where are Mike’s parents, where’s Grammy?

Where…

Where did they all go?

Pulling his legs up to his chest, Mike digs his heels into the seat padding and rests his temple on his knee.

Which part of this is real?

(Not that part, please.)

_Please._

The bus stops a few blocks down to pick up some more kids Mike doesn’t recognize, though they seem to recognize him; at the very least, they’re not confused to see him there.

The invariable suburban scenery rolls by.

_Isn’t this what I wanted?_

Mike closes his eyes as a vague memory comes into focus. _I want to be somewhere else,_ or something like that; that’s what he asked for, isn’t it? For his life to be different, for reality to stop being real. For his parents to be alive, that’s what he meant, but this is good too, isn’t it? That boy by the door was probably his brother, the woman his mother; so his name is Harvey now, so what? It’s okay. This life, this trade, it’s okay.

The bus stops for only one new passenger this time and moves on quickly.

Mike sighs.

It’s not okay.

His parents are gone no matter where he is, and if he’s here, then Grammy must be all alone, and that’s not fair. The pain in his chest reminds him that he misses her, and staying away just so he doesn’t have to face reality, well… That can’t last long, can it?

“Harvey! Come on!”

Mike looks up at the call; the boy from before (Harvey’s brother, not his) waves him on, still looking confused and now sort of angry too, so Mike gets up and follows him off the bus. BIGELOW is printed in big silver letters across the building, and Mike trudges up the stairs, urged along with the masses and without too clear an idea of where he is or what he’s doing. This is just school, though, this is easy. Maybe no one expects much of Harvey, maybe he’ll be left alone.

And what _about_ Harvey, Mike realizes then. Where is he? This life that’s his now isn’t really; it wasn’t suddenly invented because Mike wished for it, and his old life didn’t disappear when he left. Maybe Harvey, whoever he is, is taking care of it for him, like they’ve swapped places. That would make sense, right, if he’s here in Harvey’s place, then Harvey must be there in his, with Grammy and Trevor and Tess and everything.

And everything.

Mike follows a group of kids who look to be about his age into a classroom and sits at a desk in the back. A stocky brunette girl smiles at him shyly and he tucks one of his feet up on the seat.

A middle-aged man walks through the door and shuts it behind himself, dropping a stack of papers on the table at the front of the room and reading from a list of announcements that Mike doesn’t hear.

What is he supposed to do now?

Mike finds himself recalling that old fear everyone always has at summer camp, that their parents will move away while they’re gone and forget to tell them, or remember not to. He tucks his chin against his knee and looks down at the desk attached to his chair; this is sort of like that, isn’t it? He’s away, he’s moved away for a little while, but as long as he’s gone, as long as he’s here, his parents are still at home, everything is just the way he left it back in New York, as far as he knows. Everything is fine.

Maybe this can last awhile.

“Harvey!”

Mike looks up languidly; the teacher is looking at him askance, this close to tapping his foot impatiently.

“Sir?” Mike replies, and the man sighs.

“Everyone’s handing in their problem sets.” The pause is intentional, Mike feels it and he knows what’s coming next:

“You did complete it, didn’t you?”

Harvey must be some kind of shitty student. Mike makes a little show of looking around his desk and shrugging.

“I slept in, sir,” he says indifferently. “Guess I forgot it at home.”

A couple of guys laugh mockingly and the stocky brunette looks back with what he guesses is supposed to be sympathy. The teacher scowls, and it’s like he’s never had a student forget their homework before. Man, Mike thinks as he looks around at his fellow classmates, he’s in for it if he thinks these dorks are all gonna be straight-A scholarship winners.

“Everyone, Ms. McClintock will be here in a few minutes for Social Studies; Harvey, come with me please.”

Mike slides out of his seat and walks out the door to some catty “Oohs” that the teacher ignores. It doesn’t matter. Out in the hall, he wonders if he’ll have to hold water buckets or something, or a note will be sent home to his parents (as if it wouldn’t end up in the trash at his first bathroom break).

The teacher crouches in front of him, and Mike frowns; he’s not a _child._

“Harvey,” he chides, “this is so unlike you; I wish you’d come to me if you were having problems. I know it’s tough for you with your dad out of town so often, but I’m here to help.”

The city would chew this guy up and spit him out. Mike shakes his head.

“Just a bad morning,” he explains, and the teacher nods slowly.

“Okay, well, I’m still gonna need that problem set before the weekend; how about you and me work on it at lunch, huh? You’ve already done it once, we’ll get through it lickety-split.”

Holy crap, what an asshole.

Mike offers an appreciative smile and nods in return.

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

The teacher stands and claps him on the shoulder, ushering him back inside as Ms. McClintock (probably) appears from around the corner and walks towards them.

“Great. Now you have a good morning,” the teacher says, “and I’ll see you back here at noon.”

“Yes sir,” Mike mutters. Ms. McClintock follows him inside and he shuffles straight to the back of the room as she goes to the blackboard at the front. A bunch of kids have copies of a book called _Ancient Greece and Modern Culture_ laid out on their desks, and Mike hopes he won’t be called on; his class is still on the Spanish Conquests.

He shouldn’t have worried; McClintock sure does love the sound of her own voice.

English passes much the same. Harvey’s class is reading _Goodbye, Mr. Chips_ , which Mike has already read twice—once for school, once to kill an hour after his class was administered an IQ test that he finished in about thirty minutes. The teacher doesn’t call on him anyway; presumably, Harvey isn’t the best student in _any_ of his classes. All the better.

After Math, some other boy comes up to Mike and smacks him on the back, which hurts less than Mike expected, and grins a big toothy grin.

“You coming to practice this afternoon?” the boy asks. “Or did Lesnick stick you in detention?”

“No detention,” Mike retorts. Practice? Is Harvey some kind of athlete? “But I dunno, I think I’m getting sick or something. I’ve got a stomachache and my head kind of hurts.”

The boy grabs his shoulder and jostles it, still smiling that stupid smile. “Man! Come on! We’re playing F. A. Day next week, we’ll mop the floor with them, you gotta come!”

“I said I don’t feel well,” Mike snaps, shaking him off and stalking away.

The problem set at lunch couldn’t be easier, except for the part where Mr. Lesnick (apparently) keeps trying to be his friend, asking all sorts of nosy questions about Harvey’s home life; Mike gathers that Harvey’s father is out of town pretty regularly, though he still doesn’t know why. Science class is as boring as Mike expected and he spends most of History staring out the window and trying not to fall asleep.

On the bus home, everyone goes out of their way to avoid him. Mike sits at the back again and wouldn’t pay any mind except that they make a show of it, purposefully choosing seats close to him and then pretending they hadn’t noticed he was there before they move up to the front.

Mike looks out the window and tries to remember which is his stop. It helps that the driver looks back at him querulously when he doesn’t move to get off right away; he nods to the man as he disembarks, which, judging by the perplexed stare he receives in return, is not the usual thing.

Harvey’s mother looks weirdly flustered when he walks in the door, tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling broadly on top of her very deliberately arranged posture. He pauses with his hand on the doorframe, waiting for her to explain herself although he’s pretty sure she’s waiting for him to leave.

She clears her throat and cocks her hip out a little more.

“Harvey,” she greets belatedly. “Where’s Marcus, I wonder, when’s your brother going to be coming home?”

Marcus, huh?

Mike shrugs.

“I didn’t see him on the bus,” he says, walking back down the hall toward Harvey’s (his) (no, Harvey’s) bedroom. She seems glad to see him go; the feeling is mutual.

Mike sits on the bed and looks out the window.

Now what.

Mike ought to be trying to figure out how to get back home, maybe, or at least feeling guiltier that he doesn’t know how. The thing is, though, that he knows he should, he _knows_ it, and he _wants_ to, but…not so badly. Not badly enough.

While he’s here, at summer camp, he can pretend that everything is normal, everything is just as he left it. He’ll treat this like a game, an alternate universe, like _Sidewise in Time_ or something. This Place is somewhere new, somewhere challenging, and his old life Over There will stay waiting for him until he gets back, and everything will be fine.

Until he gets back.

If he ever gets back.

If Harvey ever lets him.

Harvey.

Looking around the room, Mike gets up off the bed and wanders over to the desk; he shoves the books aside into haphazard stacks, the pens and pencils into a pile. Ripping the top page from a stray legal pad, he sets it down on the desk and sits, kicking his heels against the floor and snatching up a pen to tap on his thigh.

Harvey.

He wonders if Harvey knows what’s going on, how they got themselves into this situation. If he knows what’s so special about the two of them, what roll of the dice tangled them up together, whether they’ll ever meet. What’s the point of all of this, what’s the point of any of it?

Those are some pretty big questions.

So for now, this.

\---

Harvey wakes to the sound of heavy rain falling on the windowsill; stretching his arms up over his head, he flexes his fingers one by one, feeling the length of them, the shape and the joints, exactly as he expects. It’s a strange thing to notice, but it comforts him somehow, the fact that this is him, this is familiar. Things have slotted into place that were misaligned before.

A nagging sense in the back of his mind tries to remind him of something, something bad; it feels almost like a premonition, a warning his brain is trying to give. Someone is going to die, it says, someone important. He doesn’t know who, or when, or how, but he knows it sure enough that it might as well have already happened.

The sound of the rain is nice, but it means that practice will almost definitely be cancelled today. Even if it stops, the fields are sure to be drenched, and he hopes the pitcher’s mound hasn’t been washed away. He doesn’t remember anyone setting up a tarp.

Rolling over onto his stomach, Harvey sighs into his pillow. That means there’s really no excuse not to start on his homework; he’s got an essay on the difference between an empire and a monarchy or a parliamentary or something due Monday, and he hasn’t read the assignment since he got it, but he already knows that the subject is so boring that it’ll take _forever._

Harvey tosses his blankets aside and yawns as he walks to his desk.

A page torn from a legal pad is laid out on the desk protector, maybe a note from his mom about another weekend business trip, or from Marcus about the five bucks he borrowed while Harvey wasn’t looking that he’ll totally pay back ASAP no worries.

No. He doesn’t recognize the handwriting.

_Who are you?_

He sits carefully in his desk chair and grips the edges of the seat.

_Harvey Specter._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leinster, M. (1934). _Sidewise in Time._ New York, NY: Street  & Smith.
> 
> [Bigelow Middle School](http://www.newton.k12.ma.us/bigelow) is a public school in Newton, Massachusetts.


	3. family

Marcus knocks loudly on his door; Harvey recognizes the rapid staccato, one-two-three-four-five, weirdly comforting in its familiarity even though he should be annoyed by the intrusion.

“Harvey,” Marcus calls, “breakfast, you coming? Mom’s making pancakes.”

Harvey can’t remember the last time Mom made anything for breakfast. Did something happen? Maybe this has something to do with that weird sense he woke up with that somebody died.

_Who are you?_

He’ll get to that later.

“Yeah,” he hollers, getting up out of his chair and forcing his eyes from the page, “right there.”

_Who are you?_

Harvey frowns. Who are _you,_ he wants to write back, but no, no, now it’s time for breakfast, and Harvey needs to figure out what that’s all about first.

As it happens, not only did his mother make pancakes, but three plates are already fixed and set out on the kitchen table, fruit and juice and silverware and napkins and everything. Harvey sits at his usual spot, looking to his brother curiously, but Marcus is far too enthusiastic about the prospect of a decent breakfast for once to worry about ulterior motives behind it.

His mother sits across from him and smiles. Sticking his fork into the stack, Harvey cautiously smiles back.

They eat in silence for a good long while.

“So, Harvey,” his mother says then, keeping her eyes on her nearly-cleaned plate. “Are you feeling better today?”

Harvey frowns. “Am I what?”

She looks up, seeming somehow calmed by his reply. “Marcus tells me you were being awfully quiet on the bus yesterday morning, keeping to yourself, and after you forgot your bag, I couldn’t help thinking there might be something wrong that you weren’t telling me about.”

Marcus studiously avoids his gaze, a light flush coloring his ears and the skin just under his eyes, and Harvey thins his lips.

Forgot his bag? He didn’t, did he? No, he would never; it’s always right by his desk in the morning, ready to go, and he’s never woken up late a day in his life. Is Marcus trying to make him look bad for some reason? What kind of crap has he been telling her?

“Nothing’s wrong,” he says. “I’m fine. I’ve got an essay due on Monday, maybe it’s stressing me out more than I thought.”

His mother smiles again, nodding with something like relief at the excuse. (What was she expecting, exactly?) “Alright,” she chirps, “well, I’ll be out for a few hours today, but let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Yeah, whatever.

Harvey nods.

The three of them sit still for a few awkward seconds before his mother gets up and starts clearing the table. Marcus flees the house, probably going to hide at one of stupid friends’ houses; he has to come back sometime, and Harvey can deal with him then. For now, he has more important things to think about, so he heads back to his room and shuts the door.

_Who are you?_

If this is some kind of prank…

Harvey shakes his head. If it _is_ a prank, it’s a bad one; he won’t take the paper outside his room, and he doesn’t plan to confront Marcus with it, or anyone else, for that matter. There’s no harm in responding; if nothing happens, well, then nothing happens, no harm no foul.

Sitting back at his desk, Harvey picks up the nearest pen and scribbles his name, _Harvey R. Specter._ After a moment’s thought, he writes underneath: _Who are YOU? How did you get in my room?_

There, that’s enough for now.

\---

Mike turns his head to look at the clock. 6:39; that’s weird, it feels later.

Then again, it’s not as though he got much sleep last night.

Today’s the day, after all.

Maybe if he just goes back to sleep, he can put it off for…ever. He was having a nice dream, he thinks, in the moments of rest he was able to snatch; he was somewhere else, somewhere good where everything was different. Simpler, easier.

Better.

Closing his eyes, Mike presses his palms against his forehead, sliding them around to his temples. He’s forgetting something important; of course, trying to remember is the worst way to actually do it.

Whatever. If it’s really such a big deal, it’ll come to him later.

Maybe if he just lies in bed for the rest of his life, he can pretend…something else.

For awhile there, it seems like it might be working.

Then it’s eight-oh-one, which is actually pretty early for Mike on a weekend, and Grammy knocks on the door (she knows he’s up, she must), and then it isn’t working anymore.

He knew better. He did.

Sitting up, Mike pushes the blankets to the side and yawns. This isn’t fair, he’s been up for hours.

As if it would’ve been fair if he had slept through the night.

Shuffling across the floor, Mike opens his bedroom door and looks up blearily at his grandmother, who offers a sympathetic smile and he wants to ask _why,_ why are you _doing_ that, you’ve just lost your _son_ and you’re _smiling_ about— _anything,_ what is _wrong_ with you?

He wants to ask, but he doesn’t, because he knows why. He doesn’t feel it, or anything, really, but he knows.

“Morning,” he mumbles into his chest. His grandmother strokes his hair down the back of his head.

The sun shines down on the floor in sharp triangular patterns, illuminating dust particles floating through the air. Mike wishes it was raining, but not really; it would fit, but they don’t deserve something like that on their special day.

To everything there is a season, and a time and purpose under the heaven.

Maybe someday it’ll be a comfort to think like that.

Mike closes his eyes, and his grandmother keeps stroking his hair. He listens to her sigh, and he listens to the silence.

“We’ll have to leave in about an hour,” she says, and he nods.

She strokes his hair one more time before she steps back.

“Do you want me to make you some breakfast?” she asks, and he can’t think of anything he wants less than food at this exact moment.

“Thank you.”

She nods and turns to go downstairs to the kitchen. He shuffles back into his bedroom and closes the door.

What’s the point of all of this? What’s the point of _any_ of it?

_Who are you?_

Mike drops to his knees, not quite out of grief, no; there’s something there, something, _familiar,_ something close to the surface, something special, something _different,_ but what, what, what _is_ it, _what?_

He looks around a little frantically; surely there must be something here, something to give a hint, a clue, a sign, an omen—

The notebook.

Scrambling to his feet, Mike falls toward his desk; there’s a notebook there, a notebook he certainly didn’t leave out on purpose (not that he can recall); a hint, a clue, a message, something, anything! He snatches it up (spiral, _Mead_ ) and slides his finger under the flimsy cardboard cover (navy blue, COLLEGE RULED) and

stops.

What if.

What if there _is_ a message?

Who might it be from? Does he want to know? It’s not some last request from his parents from beyond the grave, he’s not stupid enough to fall for that, and if there even is one, it probably isn’t a joke because he doesn’t know anyone quite that cruel, so then…

Mike runs his finger up the edge of the cover.

He won’t learn anything by just standing here.

The first page is…blank.

Mike finds himself scowling; nothing is somehow worse than something, even something bad. Well, maybe not, but he’s hard pressed at the moment to think of what exactly _would_ have been worse.

He flips to the second page. That one is blank as well, but through the paper he sees—yes, definitely, there’s writing underneath. A few lines of it, too.

Taking a deep breath, he turns the page again.

_Hi Michael._

Michael.

Mike holds the notebook a little away from himself. Only his grandmother calls him that.

_I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry._

That’s…nice.

He shouldn’t feel resentful; he doesn’t even know this person, and they were probably trying to be kind.

(He does, though, a little.)

_Do you like baseball? I do. I’m the starting pitcher on my school’s team. I’m going to be a ~~proffesional~~ professional when I grow up._

It reads like someone trying to start a conversation, or fill an awkward pause. Mike isn’t sure he likes this person, this person with the poor spelling and statistically improbable (nearly impossible) ambition that they—he, probably, seems so sure of. Doesn’t he knows it’s dangerous to plan too far in advance? Dangerous to have ambitions because everything can change in an instant?

_My name is Harvey._

Harvey.

_Remember?_

Mike stares at the page.

_Harvey! Come on!_

“Michael!”

He startles, nearly dropping the notebook at the sound of Grammy’s voice.

Right. Even if this notebook, this message does mean something, or what Mike thinks it means, however insane that sounds, however impossible…it doesn’t change reality. His reality, his life. You’re still here, he reminds himself, and there’s still today to get through, and it was probably really nice to think that it wasn’t, but you can’t pretend anymore. You can’t pretend right now, you can’t pretend today.

Shoving the notebook in his top desk drawer, Mike takes a sharp breath in and out before he opens the door and goes downstairs. He can do it. He can do it.

Grammy made omelets, with slivers of bell pepper and little cubes of ham. Toast, too, and orange juice.

Mike sits at the table and looks down at his plate.

He should eat; she went to all this trouble, and he did ask for it.

It tastes like paper. Mike suspects that everything will, now, maybe for awhile, but he eats as much as he can stand—half the omelet, two bites of toast—and his eyes go out of focus as he drinks the juice all in one go. His grandmother watches him without watching him; glances every now and again, subtle little things, and he waits for her to tell him to clean his plate.

“We can get going whenever you put your suit on,” she says instead. He balls his hands into fists and clenches his teeth; mushy toast crumbs are stuck in the crevices of his enamel, and it makes his tongue itch when he grinds his molars.

After breakfast, or whatever that was, he fetches his suit from the hall closet where his mother keeps her nicest dress and those black high-heeled shoes she says (said) are so uncomfortable but make her legs look longer and thinner so she wears (wore) them anyway. Slamming the door, he rubs his eyes even though he isn’t crying, and after he’s changed, he and Grammy get in the car and she waits a little bit before she starts the engine.

The sun is behind them, shining down too bright, and he pulls his knees up to his chest to make himself as small as he possibly can.

They get to the cemetery after…not too long, he isn’t sure exactly. Maybe ten minutes, maybe forty-five. There’s another funeral going on across the field; everyone there is old and grey-haired, except for the minister and the man with his hands on the back of some huddled person’s wheelchair.

Mike hates them all, but he isn’t sure exactly why.

Then his grandmother opens the car door on his side and waits for him to come out. They talked about this, he thinks; he’s not going to go into the chapel with her, where the caskets are still open. “You don’t need to see that,” she said, and he’d agreed.

Right.

“It’ll be over there,” Grammy says, pointing a little ways to the right of the other funeral. “You can go over now, if you’d like, or you can wait for me to come back and we’ll go together.”

Mike gets out of the car and walks to the edge of the grass, folding his arms over his chest, and Grammy puts her hand on his shoulder before she goes into the chapel.

Harvey probably hasn’t ever had to deal with anything like this. Harvey with his brother, and his mom and his dad, and his friends and his star position on his school’s baseball team.

Then Grammy comes back and puts her hand on his arm and they walk over to the gravesite, and Mike stands beside a big hole in the ground as Father Walker talks about how great his parents are (were) and what a terrible loss this is for the community (and everyone) and how they all need to be strong and supportive of one another (Mike) and death is always difficult but they (Mike) can get through it together (bullshit).

Tears fall from Mike’s eyes, but he isn’t really crying, exactly.

Mike thinks about the navy blue notebook in his desk drawer and wonders what Harvey would say about all of this.

Maybe he would understand.

(Hi Michael.)

Mike rubs the tears from his face.

_Can you take me somewhere else?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)


	4. acknowledgement

The moment Harvey wakes up, he wants to go back to sleep. The blankets are too heavy, the sun too bright, the planet somehow tipped slightly on its axis; not enough to be apocalyptically unbalanced, just disorienting and really, really annoying.

The moment the light hits his eyes, though, he knows he’s not going back to sleep; might as well lean into it. Pushing the blankets aside as he clambers out of bed, Harvey yawns and stretches his arms back and frowns.

This is…not his room.

Come to think of it, these are not his pants, and have his arms and legs always been this scrawny?

Walking slowly, prepared for the worst (whatever that means), Harvey goes to the desk across the floor; a navy blue spiral notebook lies in the center, bracketed by stacks of seemingly unused textbooks and the like, and if movies like _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ have taught him anything, it’s that picking up innocuous-seeming items—especially books—is the surest way to move the plot along. The room itself doesn’t seem out to get him, so Harvey leans over the desk and habitually opens the book to the third page.

_Hi Michael. I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry._

Harvey frowns. He doesn’t know any Michael, especially one whose parents have…died, probably, but that’s definitely his handwriting.

_Do you like baseball? I do._

That— No, it couldn’t be. That was—that was just a dream, wasn’t it?

But somehow, a couple of lines down and in a different hand, there’s an actual response:

_Thanks, I guess. You didn’t know them so this is weird. I don’t know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that you told Trevor not to go to their funeral, I was ~~very~~ ~~really~~ sad when I was there but I think I’m probably glad he didn’t see me crying._

_Baseball is okay, I don’t really pay attention but I like the Mets. I don’t play sports, but I know it’s really competitive professionally and that one percent of high school players make it to the pros or something like that I think. You must be good though if you’re the starting pitcher so does that mean you play a lot?_

_Be nice to Grammy and if you know how to switch places please tell me and maybe we can schedule it better or something._

How to switch places.

So this is really happening.

But, “if you know how to switch places,” he said. So then Michael doesn’t know what’s going on, either. Well, they can’t exactly start going around asking people about the problem, can they? They would sound crazy, and no one would believe them. Hopefully Michael is smart enough to realize that and doesn’t try to ask Harvey’s parents for help, which would probably end at a psychiatrist, or his brother, which would definitely end in a lifetime of teasing.

For the time being, though, what exactly is Harvey supposed to do? No one tried to wake him up early, so it probably isn’t a school day, but…what does Michael usually do on the weekend? Does he hang out with what’s-his-name, Trevor? Harvey doesn’t want to spend any more time with that guy than he has to, but it’ll probably cause trouble for Michael if he starts behaving too differently, and if Michael would even consider inviting Trevor to his parents’ funeral, they must be pretty good friends.

The important thing to remember is that if they really have switched places, then Michael is in charge of Harvey’s life for the day. If they switch back and he finds out that Harvey’s caused him nothing but trouble, who knows what he’ll do in retaliation?

Harvey sighs and closes the notebook, sticking it in the backpack beside the desk for safekeeping. This isn’t going to be easy.

Going to the dresser at the foot of the bed, Harvey has a sudden sense of déjà vu; shirts are in this drawer, pants are in that one; socks are in here, underwear in there.

He shakes his head and opens the drawer at the bottom, the one he doesn’t seem to remember at all. It’s full of sweatshirts, which feel like a safe bet; everybody wears sweatshirts on the weekend. The off-white one he pulls over his head feels about a size too large, but it’s all he has to go on, and anyway, Mike is probably pretty sad still about his parents; a baggy sweatshirt will make him look kind of pathetic, so that’ll help.

Opening the bedroom door, Harvey takes note of three other rooms on this floor—another bedroom and a bathroom, probably, but he doesn’t know about the third—and goes downstairs. Michael’s grandmother sits at the kitchen table with a book, and Harvey stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets as he shuffles over to her.

Glancing up, she lays the book down and smiles at him.

“Good morning,” she says softly. “How did you sleep?”

Harvey shrugs, and she folds her hands on the tabletop, still smiling.

“What do you want to do today?” she asks, which feels like a prompt, like she expects the answer to be “nothing” and she’s giving him the opportunity to make it anything else.

Harvey shrugs again and looks down at his socks.

“Are you going to see any of your friends?” she hints, and he clicks his tongue.

“I guess,” he mutters. She nods, resting her hand on her book’s spine.

“Just be careful,” she says, “and be home before dark. Call me if you decide to go to Manhattan.”

Grunting his acquiescence, Harvey grabs an apple from the counter and walks out the front door.

Down the block, a boy—Trevor, he realizes—is already heading his way. Harvey takes a bite of the apple and waits where he is.

“Mike!” Trevor calls from about half a block away, and Harvey ambles down the walkway through Michael’s—or, apparently, _Mike’s_ front yard. Trevor jogs the last few feet and smiles good-naturedly.

“Hey,” he greets before his smile drops with a wince. “Uh, how’re you doing?”

“Fine,” Harvey says coolly; it’s probably halfway between his actual irritation and Mike’s anger or sadness or whatever he’s feeling about his parents. Trevor just nods.

“You wanna go to the park or something?” he asks, looking nearly as awkward as he sounds, and Harvey stops himself from smiling.

“I guess,” he says, waiting for Trevor to take the lead and following in step.

They walk in silence for awhile until a blonde girl Harvey sort of recognizes but can’t place crosses the street toward them, smiling nervously.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi,” Trevor replies, and Harvey nods. Another of Mike’s friends, probably.

“Mike, I’m really sorry,” she declares, walking beside them even though Harvey is positive no one invited her. Mike isn’t part of some three musketeers friend group thing, is he? It was hard enough figuring out who Trevor was without sounding insane, and now he has to pretend to be someone he’s never met before well enough to convince _two_ hangers-on.

“Thanks,” Harvey allows, looking ahead to the greenery just coming into view.

She smiles with a little hum. “Um, if you need anything, just, you know, tell me.”

“I will,” he replies, hoping she won’t hold Mike to that. It’ll be fine, probably; people make that sort of empty promise all the time. It’s just civility.

The three of them walk on to the park in the same state of looking at each other without trying to get caught, although Harvey suspects they’re both more interested in him than in one another. They’re trying to be nice, he knows, trying to be good friends, but if this kind of overbearing sympathy is what Mike has to deal with all the time, Harvey can’t say he’s mad at him for wanting to swap lives for a little while.

Of course, if Mike does anything to mess up his future baseball career, Harvey’s going to make him pay.

\---

_I was miles and miles and miles away._

And everything is dark and cold.

Mike curls up tight, pressing his fists against his chest as his breath comes in quick pants and he squeezes his eyes shut.

This bed, this body isn’t quite familiar; he’s been here before, he thinks but isn’t certain, but wherever he is, it’s safe, it’s whole. Sanctuary. A reprieve, which is a word he looked up in the dictionary after Father Walker used it at the funeral.

Reprieve.

Opening his eyes, Mike shuffles out of bed with the blanket clutched around his shoulders and looks left, right, up and down; yes, this room is a place he knows, but only sort of. Mostly chaos, but the desk is an effort to look neat, to instill order, and he finds a sheet of legal paper laid out on top of the peeling plastic desk protector.

_Who are you?_

That’s his hand, or a perfect imitation, but he only has a hazy memory of having written the words (is it possible to forget such a thing?). Underneath is a more accusatory version, written bigger and with rounder letters: _Harvey R. Specter. Who are YOU?_

Harvey, there’s that name again. (Again?)

_How did you get in my room?_

Mike sits at the desk and picks up a pen.

 _Mike Ross,_ he writes, and then, because Harvey did it first, he scrawls a caret between his first and last names and writes _J._ above it.

 _I don’t know,_ he writes on the next line. _I woke up here. Sorry._

After a moment’s thought, he continues:

_I like your family. When I was little I used to wish I had a brother but then when I got older I stopped wishing that because I think we’d just fight, but your brother is kind of cool. I’ll try to be nice to him for you._

He wonders if Harvey R. Specter would appreciate that.

Someone bangs on the bedroom door.

“Har-vey!”

“Yeah?” Mike calls back, taking a moment to be proud of himself for knowing to respond to the name.

“Come _on,_ you said you’d take me and Billy to the ar _cade_ today!”

He did?

Mike doesn’t even know where _he_ is, much less where the _arcade_ is. It’s hard to keep from panicking, but hey, he’ll figure it out. This is only temporary, anyway.

“After breakfast,” Mike calls back, and Marcus hits the door again.

“Fine but you have to let me play Zaxxon and you can’t tell Mom!”

Mike wouldn’t be surprised if Harvey’s mom overheard his brother’s shouting, but he calls back “Fine!” all the same and shoves his and Harvey’s conversation into a drawer, just in case. He might make Harvey seem forgetful or stupid, but he won’t make him seem insane.

The closet is full of brighter colors than he’d expected, and a whole lot of denim.

Mike doesn’t give much thought to whatever he changes into, making sure to lift his chest and his chin as he walks out into the hall hoping to seem prideful (Harvey R. Specter, baseball star) rather than depressed (Michael J. Ross, recently orphaned). This place is a reprieve, and he’s going to enjoy it as long as he can.

Harvey’s brother ( _Marcus_ hums in his brain) thrusts a banana into his hands and tries to push him towards the front door; Mike stumbles over his own feet, veering out of his grip.

“Five minutes,” Mike scolds. Marcus rolls his eyes and Mike begins to peel the banana.

“Where’s Mom?” he asks, pretending the question doesn’t make his tongue feel leaden.

Marcus looks at him oddly. “The college,” he says in that long-suffering way Tess gets sometimes when she thinks Mike is being such a _boy,_ as she puts it. “There’s some project or something going on, or a show, or a presentation or something, I dunno, a thing. She’s been talking about it all month.”

Oops.

Mike nods sharply. “Right, never mind.”

The moment he pops the last bit of fruit into his mouth, Marcus grabs the peel from his hand and throws it on the kitchen counter, dragging him into the foyer; grabbing a pair of blue Nikes he assumes to be Harvey’s, Mike smiles to himself at how Marcus’s impatience and eagerness reminds him of Trevor. They would get along great, if they didn’t kill each other first (and knowing Trevor, they just might).

“Come! On!” Marcus barks, throwing the door open and waving impatiently toward the outdoors. Mike needn’t have worried about finding the arcade, it seems; Marcus marches ahead of him and knows exactly where to go.

A small redheaded boy who must be Billy is waiting on his front porch, and the moment he and Marcus meet up, Mike may as well have disappeared.

This must be how his parents felt whenever he and Trevor hung out, Mike thinks, the fond nostalgia tinged sour when he remembers that he’s not changed reality so much as fled it for the moment. (There’s no escape, truly, not even here.)

Marcus and Billy keep talking, alternately thunderously and too quiet to hear, and Mike scuffs his heel against the ground as he walks.

He can’t stay in this place.

This is Harvey’s little brother, Harvey’s mother with her project or show or presentation or whatever at the college, Harvey’s father who’s out of town so often but probably a great dad when he’s around, maybe Harvey’s best friend. Harvey’s spot on the baseball team, Harvey’s mediocre grades and well-intentioned teachers, Harvey’s messy room and brightly colored clothes and familiar honey-colored desk that’s close but isn’t quite the same.

Mike will have to go back at some point, he knows well enough, and if he tries to take breaks by hiding somewhere he doesn’t belong, he’ll never get over…anything, any of it. Not that he’ll get over it anyway, he’s pretty sure, but he has to try _something,_ he has to make _some_ progress. Learn to appreciate those bouquets and brownies and macaroni casseroles for what they mean instead of what they are.

For the time being, he watches Harvey’s little brother and his friend chatter away excitedly and tries to bring himself to feel happy for them.

It’s a good effort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Zaxxon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon) is an isometric shooter arcade game released in 1982.


	5. impertinence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to the [timeline](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/166090473589/suits-keeps-throwing-timeline-facts-at-me-and-i-am) I've devised by combing through _Suits_ canon, nothing specifically notable happens to either Mike or Harvey between the ages of 11 (Mike's parents die) and 16 (Harvey catches his mother cheating), so this chapter covers a few years in not a lot of exposition. (They're 14 in the first section, 15 in the second, and 16 in the third.)

Harvey presses his hands to his eyes and bares his teeth at the sound of the alarm. Mike’s alarm. God dammit, the first game of the season is tomorrow and he needs to work on his breaking pitch. They haven’t switched places for two weeks and it has to happen _now?_ Why not last Friday? Mike could’ve taken that goddamn Bio test for him, that would’ve been a load off his mind.

Although, come to think of it, Mike might have tanked the test on purpose to get back at Harvey for making a pass at what’s-her-name, Emily; that had been an honest mistake, though, seriously, how was Harvey supposed to know that Mike had turned her down for some stupid middle school graduation dance last year? Who’s even heard of a middle school graduation _dance,_ anyway? Some flashy party to celebrate a totally routine event, it’s _stupid._

Resigned to his fate, at least for the time being, Harvey rolls out of bed and stumbles to Mike’s dresser for a clean t-shirt and the least baggy pair of jeans he can find, which are unfortunately not the least threadbare. Picking up Mike’s backpack (always left on the desk chair), he scans the room for any notes Mike might have left about upcoming events to be on the lookout for; a yellow Post-It is stuck to the door with the words “STOP WASTING MY MONEY” printed on it in bold Sharpie, and Harvey rolls his eyes before pulling it down and dropping it in the trash. He was hungry, he bought a sandwich, big deal. Trevor was the one who tossed the chips and Coke onto the counter at the last second, Harvey didn’t even want them.

“GO TO THE GYM” Harvey scribbles on the notepad Mike has taken to keeping in his desk drawer for them to chat on, confident that the suggestion will be taken as seriously as ever; that is to say, Mike will completely ignore it. After Harvey pointed out that being athletic would make it easier for Mike to get girls and Mike told him to go to hell, it shifted from honest recommendation to running gag, but it makes Harvey smile, and Mike keeps responding, so maybe it makes him smile, too.

He hopes so. Mike could use it; he’s been through a lot.

Harvey likes coming here, sometimes, once the initial disorientation which always greets him has worn off; Edith (he calls her “Grammy” out loud to avoid suspicion, but it feels extra dishonest) is a nice woman, and she doesn’t take any crap, which is…good. She won’t let Mike get away with anything, and he complains about it all the time, but at least she loves him and looks out for him, which Harvey appreciates. He does what he can, but it’s not nearly enough.

“Michael!”

Speaking of.

Harvey hoists Mike’s backpack over his shoulders and heads downstairs, where Edith is waiting at the kitchen table with a plate of toast and jam that she pushes on him.

“You don’t want to be late,” she warns, and he shakes his head as he accepts one of the slices.

“No ma’am.”

She grins. “Don’t sass me, boy.”

Smiling back with raspberry seeds in his teeth, he runs off before she can scold him further.

This is nice, this life.

It’s been a long while since Mike mentioned being consumed by his crushing loneliness. That doesn’t mean it’s left him, Harvey knows well enough, but maybe he’s learning to live with it. That would be good, too. Well, pretty good. Good enough. For now.

Harvey counts the steps before Trevor will rush to meet up with him as he always does; nine, ten, eleven, and sure enough, there he is, thumping Harvey on the back and making some sarcastic comment that Harvey has since learned to tune out.

They’re not much alike, Mike and Trevor. Mike is smart and clever and wants to be challenged, and Trevor is sneaky and conniving and wants to beat the system. Harvey thinks so, anyway, although without having ever actually _met_ Mike, he can’t be sure. Nevertheless, Trevor thinks he and Mike are bound to be best friends forever and reminds Harvey (or, Mike, as far as he knows) of that on a regular basis, especially when Harvey starts acting too much like himself. That conviction is probably why Mike sticks around him, mistaking his attachment for devotion or something.

Awhile back, Mike told Harvey, who didn’t ask, that Trevor made him cheat on a math test one time in third grade.

Trevor is an idiot, but Harvey puts up with him for Mike’s sake.

He’s glad that Mike has friends.

\---

Sunlight streams in through Harvey’s bedroom window and hits Mike right in the eye. Pushing his chair back from the desk, Mike winces, cradling his sore shoulder; it’s getting more and more difficult to cover for Harvey at baseball practice as expectations of him have seemingly skyrocketed, but Harvey insists that he not skip, that he needs to keep his body conditioned. Mike is glad Harvey’s doing well on the team; he deserves it for how hard he works.

(Might be nice if his family saw it that way.)

_It’s so weird, going to a new school, right? I don’t just mean the hallways and the teachers and stuff, I mean I actually had to try out for the baseball team and wait a week and check the list and everything. I made it, obviously, but still, it was so weird._

_Yeah I guess, but it’s not that different. New classes, new teachers, same boring old crap. I went to a Photography Club meeting last week but they have assignments so I don’t think I’m going to join. Grammy liked the idea of me making some new friends but I don’t need anyone to tell me what pictures to take._

_I think my mom would like it if I joined a photography club, or some other artsy thing like that. She’s an art teacher, I don’t know if I ever mentioned that? Or if you ever figured it out? I don’t really know what she does, specifically. I mean, I know she paints weird stuff, but that’s about it. One time, she painted this big duck, or frog, or something, and it was holding a doll of a girl, and I really didn’t get it. I guess, maybe, she teaches…abstract art? I don’t know what that is, exactly. Art is weird._

_That doesn’t sound like abstract art, that sounds like surrealism. Is she good?_

_I guess? Hey, do you know why Kirsten is acting like we’ve got a date next weekend? Did you say something to her? Don’t try to get me a girlfriend, you dick! If I’m going to get the starting pitcher slot next year, I need to be able to practice every single day! And, besides, if I DID want a girlfriend, I could get one on my own, and it wouldn’t be Kirsten. She’s annoying, and she always smells like chlorine._

_She seems nice and I’m pretty sure she likes you, I just asked if she wanted to see a movie or something. Her friends were making plans and she was getting left out, I felt bad, you don’t have to go. Besides, you told Trevor he was a jackass and he got all mad at me, consider it payback if you’re that offended._

_Oh, yeah, like I’m not going to go after that. If I don’t get the starting pitcher slot, I’m blaming you._

Mike smirks as he tosses their old correspondences back into Harvey’s desk drawer. Harvey will definitely get the starting slot; a day off probably did him some good, anyway.

As he spins slowly in the desk chair, smirk gradually fading, his eye catches on the drawer, which is open just a crack after he closed it too forcefully. A weird pins-and-needles sort of sensation pricks at his brain; there’s something in Harvey’s words, something that doesn’t sit right.

_I guess?_

Harvey must have known about the date with Kirsten before he brought it up in their notes; Mike remembers making it, and they’d switched one other time before it actually happened. They don’t share _everything_ with one another, so it’s not too strange that Harvey hadn’t brought it up at first, but if it was really so offensive to him, then…why not?

_Hey…_

Come to think of it, other than his brother, Harvey has never told Mike how to act around any specific people; not his mother, not his teachers, not any friends or teammates. He likes the high grades Mike gets him and he complains if Mike does something that makes him seem weak, but beyond that…

_Grammy liked the idea…_

Mike wonders if Harvey has ever been tempted to tell anyone about the switching, or feared that anyone suspects. More than once, especially when it first started, Mike nearly told Grammy; one time, in an ill-conceived attempt to impress her, he even had to stop himself from telling Tess.

He and Harvey have never talked about it.

For all the time they spend trying to convince other people that they can pass as one another, they don’t actually know much about each other as people.

Mike glances at the wall clock. It’s nearly seven; Harvey’s mother is out with friends, supposedly, and Marcus hasn’t come out of his room all evening, but Mike doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Last time this happened, he found a stack of Swanson’s boxes in the freezer.

Mike sighs.

\---

It happens more often than not, but it’s nevertheless become a specific pleasure over the last five years to wake up in his own body.

Harvey kicks off his bedsheets, nightshirt sticking to his skin when he arches his back off the mattress. The summer nights are a lot more humid in Newton than they are in Queens lately; much as he enjoys being back home, it would’ve been nice if Mike had at least turned on the fan before he went to sleep last night.

Speaking of Mike, Harvey spies a lone sheet of printer paper on his desk across the room. Mike usually leaves any new messages in the drawer with all their other conversations “for security,” he says, but Harvey thinks he just likes pretending to be a spy or a secret agent.

Grabbing a pair of track pants out of the closet, Harvey puts them on as he hovers over the desk to read Mike’s latest.

_I don’t want to say anything to cause trouble for you but has it ever occurred to you that your mom has been acting kind of weird for the last couple of months?_

Harvey frowns, pulling out his desk chair and picking up the page as he sits. Has Mike gotten wind of some kind of surprise Harvey’s mother is trying to hide from him? No special event is coming up that he can think of, but maybe she has some big news to share, maybe something to do with an art show or a grant. Mike is the more observant between the two of them, but Harvey should have the advantage when it comes to noticing his own mother acting strangely, so she must be going pretty out of her way to hide it.

_I don’t know if you guys are fighting or something because you haven’t mentioned anything and she hasn’t said anything to me but she always goes out about an hour after I (you, as far as she knows) get home from practice or whatever, and she’s all jumpy and like extra cheerful when she gets back. I’m not trying to start anything, I was just wondering if you noticed it too._

Not a surprise announcement, then.

Harvey furrows his brow and rereads the paper. Surely, surely Mike isn’t saying what Harvey thinks he’s saying. Surely he isn’t implying that Harvey’s mother, that Lily Specter, professional art teacher— _Harvey’s mother_ —is doing something…illegal? He isn’t even sure what Mike is trying to hint at, but whatever it is, he’s way out of line.

Feeling heat flush his cheekbones, Harvey snatches up a rollerball pen, the most emphatic of all pens, and presses it down underneath Mike’s message hard enough to leave a bleeding spot of black ink.

 _She’s busy at the college and with her art, it’s not a big deal,_ he writes fiercely. _What do you think she’s doing, planning a bank robbery? She’s my MOM, she’s not some kind of criminal, don’t be such an asshole. Stay the hell away from my family!_

On second thought, Harvey scribbles out the last line; Mike doesn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, and if he tries to avoid Harvey’s family the next time they switch, it’ll be cause more suspicion than Harvey would care to deal with when they switch back.

 _Go to hell,_ he writes instead, underlining the words hard enough that he nearly rips the paper.

Glaring down at the exchange, Harvey shoves the pen back into his plastic pencil box. He picks up the page and folds it in half, defining the crease between his nails and shoving it off to the side where Mike might or might not notice it (but he probably will). What could possibly have possessed him to say something so _stupid,_ so _offensive?_

He couldn’t be more wrong, anyway.

Could he?

Harvey shakes his head. Definitely, Mike is definitely full of shit.

Definitely.

Most…definitely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Swanson's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson#TV_dinner_brand) was a well-known line of frozen dinners first produced in the 1950s and sold to Vlasic (now [Pinnacle](http://pinnaclefoods.com/index.php/)) in 1998.


	6. verification

Mike has always been satisfied with his and Harvey’s arrangement. The notes, that is; it’s a sensible way to communicate. It’s easy, it’s accessible, it’s inconspicuous, it’s editable; he can review what he’s written before he leaves it, hopefully keeping from saying anything to make himself sound stupid. It isn’t that he’s concerned about impressing Harvey, exactly, just that…he doesn’t want Harvey to worry too much. Doesn’t want him to think his life is in the hands of an idiot.

 _Why did you have to tell me that?_ he reads, again, the paper starting to crease and wear from the amount of time it’s spent in his hands, being hastily shoved into drawers and concealed under piles of other things before he takes it back out to reread it, again, even though he doesn’t need to see the words anymore to know what they are.

 _Why did you have to tell me that?_ Harvey asked, as though his mother’s infidelity is somehow Mike’s fault, as though pretending it hadn’t happened, isn’t happening will make it go away.

Ha. Ha, ha. Oh, the irony, so delicious.

It’s not that he feels _bad_ for pointing Harvey in that direction; it was going to come out some time or another, and Harvey didn’t deserve to be blindsided by the announcement that his mother was leaving them. Granted, it’s possible she intended to break off the affair before it became too serious, pretend it never happened and take the secret to her grave, but Harvey’s mother has never struck Mike as the sort to embark on a venture, however ill-conceived, that she didn’t intend to see through to the end. In the time from the moment Mike’s suspicions were first aroused by her occasional skittishness to the moment he could no longer pretend not to notice her tightly-scheduled absences and increasingly flimsy excuses, she obviously managed to convince herself, somehow, that she was making the right decision.

Mike has always been satisfied with his and Harvey’s arrangement, but this time, for the first time, it isn’t quite enough.

Leaning across his desk, Mike picks up the cordless phone.

_Ring…ring…_

Click.

“We're sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

Panic flairs in Mike’s chest, irrational and irrepressible.

“If you feel you have reach this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.”

Immediately, Mike thumbs the End button and dials again.

_Ring…ring…_

Click.

“We’re sorry—”

He hangs up the receiver frantically and stares at the wall.

What was he expecting? He’s been able to induce that he and Harvey aren’t the same age—he still isn’t entirely sure what the gap is, his memories from the switch always just hazy enough to keep him from be able to do the math, but he knows that the life he borrows from Harvey is at least a few years in the past—but he thought that surely someone, _someone_ would still be there at that house, surely _someone_ would pick up.

And what would he have said, exactly?

“Hi, my name is Mike Ross, you don’t know me but I’ve been trading lives with your son/brother/former tenant Harvey Specter every few days for the past five years, is he available to come to the phone right now?”

Fantastic.

Mike runs his hands up over his head, back through his hair.

He doesn’t even know what Harvey’s voice sounds like when it’s not reverberating through his own skull.

What was he going to say, anyway? “Hey man, sucks to be you, can’t say I didn’t give you fair warning”?

_I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry._

He laughs, a hollow sound that scratches the back of his throat.

No, he knows what he would’ve said.

This sucks, he wants to tell Harvey. This is awful, this is betrayal, this is deception and lies and just _mean,_ and I hate that you have to go through it. I hate that your brother is probably going to take your mother’s side, I hate that your dad is probably out of town, I hate that you probably can’t think of anyone to talk to. I hate that no one’s gonna stop by with bouquets and brownies and macaroni casseroles to try to make you feel better, because they wouldn’t, but it would be nice to know that someone was thinking of you.

This sucks, he wants to tell Harvey, but you’ll survive it. You will, because you’re Harvey R. Specter, you’re one tough son of a bitch, and you’re stronger than the mistakes that surround you. One day, you’re gonna look back on this as one of the worst days of your life, and you’re gonna look at where you are then, later on, and know that it was shit but you survived it, and I bet you thrived despite it, I bet you’re bigger and better than it, and for it.

This sucks, he wants to say, but I’m here if you want to talk. If you need a friend.

Mike rests his elbows on his desk and his face in his hands.

I’m here.

\---

Harvey stares at the ground as he walks down Centre Street, his face no longer flushed and his eyes no longer wet but his fury not yet tempered, his horror not yet abated. He hopes they never will be, hopes he can hold onto this rage forever; hopes he’ll never forget this terrible, disgusting thing that happened, this thing that his mother (his _mother_ ) did to him, to her own _family._ To her _husband._

His father. His father doesn’t know, his father _can’t_ know. It would crush him. How long has this been going on right under his nose? How long has she, that _woman,_ been sneaking around on him, playing the faithful wife and mother with that secret other life going on behind the scenes? How long has she been making a fool of him, of _all_ of them?

Anyway, who’s to say he would believe Harvey if he tried to make the accusation with no more evidence than his word? Harvey didn’t believe Mike, or refused to, when he tried to tell him; he had to see it with his own eyes, the irrefutable proof, even though Mike has only ever tried to look out for his best interests, to protect him when he needs protecting.

Mike.

Mike tried to warn him. Mike tried to be good and kind, to nudge him in the right direction without commandeering the whole goddamn train, to give him enough of a push to find the truth and still leave some room for him to keep living in denial, if that was what he wanted.

Mike didn’t even take it personally when Harvey told him to go to hell.

Mike probably understood where he was coming from.

_I’m really sorry._

Mike knows him better than that.

That’s all he really wants right now, anyway, is someone who will understand, someone who’s been there, or close enough. Someone who’s lived through it and won’t judge him for not seeing both sides of the issue as equal, which is what his brother will do, for sure. Or, no, Marcus will hear Harvey’s accusation as an attack and defend Mom without considering the other side, without considering how much her lies have hurt him, too, or should have. Would have if he was smart enough to notice.

Mike, though. Mike, who _was_ smart enough to notice when none of the rest of them were, who was exactly close enough to have just the right amount of investment and exactly far enough to dare to venture the idea out loud. Mike would listen.

Harvey scoffs under his breath and folds his arms across his chest. He can’t. He can’t do that to Mike. Even if they could get in touch, which is far from a sure thing, what would he say? “Hey, sorry I told you to fuck off when you asked me if everything was okay; you were totally right, my mom was banging some guy she met at the college and I’m pretty sure she still is, but I don’t want to tell my dad about it because it’ll hurt his feelings. Thoughts?”

Hey, sorry about that thing a few years back where your parents died after that drunk driver smashed into their car, but you got any tips on how I should handle my family drama that you tried to warn me about before it happened?

Mike would do it, too. He would try to offer some advice, or figure out some plan, or just sit and listen when Harvey needed to talk.

Harvey tightens his hold around himself. He can’t ask for that. It isn’t fair.

But what _can_ he do? There has to be something. He can’t tell his brother, who would hold their mother faultless, and he can’t tell his father, who would be humiliated; it’s a shit situation, but there’s technically no abuse going on, so he can’t go to any authorities for help. He could threaten the other man, but all he knows about him is that he has something to do with the college art department, or did, or maybe just went to a show; Harvey doesn’t even know his name.

That’s no good. How would he confront such a man, anyway? “Stop fucking my mom or I’ll beat the shit out of you”? Wishful thinking.

Who’s left, then?

No one but his mother.

She knows he knows, and if he goes to her first, it’ll be obvious that he doesn’t want to tell his father, so where’s his leverage? He doesn’t have any. It’ll have to be a simple appeal to her sense of decency, asking—no, _begging_ her to please do the right thing, have a little bit of morality, a little bit of concern for this man you built a family with, this man you’ve always claimed to love over all others.

Decency, that’s a laugh. She doesn’t have any left, if she ever did.

Looking around, Harvey realizes he’s wandered all the way back to his old middle school.

Things sure were a lot simpler then, when his biggest problems were waking up in another boy’s body every few days and trying to figure out who this “Michael” kid was without sounding completely insane.

Unzipping and re-zipping his jacket, a nervous action that doesn’t serve much purpose (which explains, of course, why he does it again, and then one more time), Harvey walks to the steep front steps and sits on the wall beside them, resting one of his feet against the railing and shoving his hands in his pockets. Maybe this is how Mike felt right after his parents died. Bereft; lonely; lost. Abandoned. Desperate for some escape, someplace to go where he can pretend that somehow things aren’t as bizarre as they are.

Harvey doesn’t know if he hopes to wake up himself tomorrow or not.

More than anything else, really, he just wants to talk to Mike.

_I’m really sorry._

\---

Mike wakes to a cool breeze blowing in through the window, open just a crack, seeping in under the thin blanket tucked around his shoulders. Grammy has an appointment with a new ENT today, this morning; well, ten-thirty, so, only technically morning, but still, he ought to get ready.

When he stretches his arms over his head, his wrist knocks against the wall.

Shit. Today, seriously? Of all days?

Well, he wrote the appointment down on his calendar with an address, and Grammy will definitely remember, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The bigger concern is how Harvey has been acting around his family since he found out about his mother’s affair.

Shit. Harvey.

Putting his hand to his forehead, Mike closes his eyes and tries to block out the memory of that staticky recorded voice.

_Please check the number and try your call again._

This isn’t quite how he’d hoped things would turn out.

Well, but wait. Is there any better way to get in touch with Harvey? Not really; anyway, today is Sunday, so Mike doesn’t have to go out if he doesn’t want to, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid seeing Harvey’s family, or at least his mother; she’ll either be spending the day as far from Harvey as possible or trying to talk to him every fifteen minutes, but that doesn’t seem like her style, so he should be in the clear.

Climbing out of bed, Mike goes to Harvey’s desk, hoping to find a missive there. Something, anything, the smallest conversation starter would be great.

There’s nothing on the desktop, so Mike starts opening drawers. Pens, pencils, a ruler, a calculator… A messy pile of their old chats…

_God dammit, Mike._

There it is.

Mike picks up the whole stack and carries it back to the bed, sitting on the covers.

_God dammit, Mike._

_If you’d never switched lives with me, this never would’ve happened, you know that? My mom wouldn’t be cheating on my dad with whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is and I wouldn’t be having to figure out how to keep this secret from my dad so he won’t be embarrassed and depressed and who knows what the fuck else, and I’d be able to look at my mom in the eye without having to worry about her knowing that I know, and trying to figure out what the fuck she wants me to do about it, and then deciding whether I want to do that or on purpose not do that, and everything would be the way it’s always been, and fuck you, Mike, you can go die in a fire._

_Wait, no, I didn’t mean that. Actually, I don’t know if I meant it, I think I might have meant it. But I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t think it is, it probably isn’t, it’s just how I’m feeling. I was going to cross it out, but then I thought you should read it, because in my head, it’s true, so I guess that’s what I think of what’s going on. Maybe you’ll get it better than if I try to explain it._

_Look, I’m sorry, okay? Please don’t get mad at me. Or do, I guess, whatever, you can do whatever you want, it’s not like you have to tell me everything. I don’t tell you everything. You know that, right? I mean, you’re the same, right? We don’t tell each other everything? Just the important stuff. If I tried to tell you everything, I think you’d get pretty bored, and I would complain about Trevor a lot, and you’d probably get pissed off._

_Whatever. I know it’s not your fault, but the point is that you were right, my mom is cheating on my dad, and I know that because I saw them together, making out in my parents’ bedroom, and then my mom didn’t say “This isn’t what it looks like!” or any of that shit, she just asked me not to tell my dad. I don’t really remember what I said, but I’m not going to tell him, not because she asked me not to, just because I don’t want him to get hurt. I guess he will, eventually, when she leaves him, because she will leave him, right, that’s what happens in these situations, but I don’t want him to get hurt before he has to. I guess I don’t want him to get hurt because of something I said. I don’t want to get in the middle of them._

_I already kind of am in the middle, though? Because I know and I’m not saying anything, to either one of them. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck_

**_fuck fuck FUCK I hate everything_ **

_~~I wish I was dead.~~ _

_~~I wish she was dead.~~ _

_Baseball season is starting kind of soon. Tryouts in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be the starting pitcher, I’m pretty sure. I kind of wish you could come to one of the games. Not in like a gay way, just you’re kind of my only friend, besides my dad, but that’s lame, and my brother, but I don’t really want to talk to him right now, and I just think it would be cool, having a friend who’s not on the team come see me play._

_This sucks._

_So, anyway, I’ll talk to you later, I guess. ~~I mean,~~ You know what I mean._

Mike’s furrowed brow smooths out as he scans the words again. It’s the most Harvey has ever written to him, by a long shot, and far more than Mike has ever written to Harvey. Mike has rarely been more grateful for his eidetic memory and never been more saddened that he can’t take any mementos with him back to his so-called “actual” life.

Refolding the pages and holding them in his lap, Mike looks up and fixes his gaze out the window.

After a minute or so, he gets up and goes over to the desk, sitting with a clean sheet of paper before him and grabbing Harvey’s nicest rollerball out of his pencil box.

Tapping his heel arrhythmically against the floor, he lowers the pen to the page.

_Hey, Harvey._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ENT: Ear, Nose, Throat, formally otolaryngology; Edith is seeing an ENT [specialist] either because she’s coughing a lot (probably due to bronchitis) or because Mike is concerned about her hearing loss, reader’s choice. She won’t be killed off prematurely, this is just an indication that her health is beginning to decline.
> 
> This chapter takes place in 1987, when the U.S. on the balance was rather openly homophobic. (I don’t mean _every person_ in the U.S. at that time was homophobic, I mean that the country as a whole had a nasty habit of sanctioning and promoting homophobia, e.g., [H.R.3058](https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/3058/amendments), especially [S.Amdt.963](https://www.congress.gov/amendment/100th-congress/senate-amendment/963).) When Harvey says “Not in like a gay way,” it’s not that he himself is homophobic so much as that he anticipates Mike interpreting Harvey’s wish to spend time with him as an advance, and he fears Mike will react badly. I just want to be clear that this story isn’t going to delve into any real issues surrounding homophobia, or anything like that; Harvey’s being hypersensitive to the matter as a function of the age he’s growing up in, but it won’t be a major plot point and Harvey is at no point going to be “revealed” to be a homophobic character, internalized or otherwise.


	7. countdown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two sections take place concurrently in the fall semester of their senior years (1988/1998); the third section takes place in 1989, at the end of Harvey's senior year.

Every morning Harvey wakes up in Mike’s tidy little stereotypically ‘70s split-level, he breathes a sigh of relief. Here’s to one more day of respite, one more day free of his mother’s deception and his brother’s blind faith and his father’s ignorance. Here’s to one more day of pretending to be a high school senior who doesn’t have to worry about keeping up his .385 batting average, whose grades are solid enough to carry him into any college he wants, who could’ve used a few more extracurriculars but it’s too late now so don’t worry about it, kiddo, you’ll do fine.

This morning in particular, he hears Edith in the bathroom down the hall, the sound of her gagging muffled in such a way that he knows her hands are pressed over her mouth so he won’t hear, won’t worry. He does, of course, but it’s a nice effort.

Here’s to one more day of pretending to be the best goddamn grandson on the planet.

Today is Tuesday; Mike has double English first thing, and Mister Zavatsky is both very fond of Mike, and slightly insane. Harvey can afford to run a few minutes late.

“Grammy?” Harvey calls, pulling on a dark plaid flannel shirt as he walks into the hall. “Are you okay?”

The sound of coughing staggers, trailing off for a few seconds before it starts up again, and Harvey raps his knuckles on the bathroom door as he knows Mike does when he’s either in a rush or especially concerned. “Grammy?”

The tap turns on, still running when she opens the door with a shallow glass in her hand and a stern expression on her weathered face.

“I’m fine, Michael,” she chastises, “so go on now or you’ll be late, I don’t want you making excuses to any of your teachers.” Frowning at his skeptical expression, she nudges past him, smothering another grunting cough. “Did you finish that poem?”

Poem? Seriously, Mike?

Oh, wait, that’s right; Zavatsky’s class is a senior poetry elective.

“Yeah,” he says, because Mike probably did, “but are you sure you’re okay? I can run to the drugstore if you need something, I’ve still got time.”

“You do not,” she replies, tapping her wrist even though there’s no watch there. “Now get going, I won’t have you miss first period on my account.”

Sighing as though leaving is some sort of burden, Harvey leans back into Mike’s room to grab his backpack. “I’ll be home right after classes,” he tosses over his shoulder on his way down the stairs. “Try not to get too bored without me.”

“Honestly, Michael,” she says, following him even though she can’t quite keep pace. “I’ll be perfectly fine, Rebecca is coming by later today for a visit and you just—you, just concentrate on your studies.”

“Yes ma’am!” Harvey salutes on his way out the door, escaping to the sound of her wry laughter. Mike and Trevor have fallen out of the habit of walking to school together, to Harvey’s delight, although they’ll certainly run into each other there, unless Trevor is skipping (again). Of course, that doesn’t matter; everything here is easier. Even handling Mike’s moronic best friend.

Harvey has no trouble being grateful.

\---

Every night Mike falls into bed in Harvey’s messy little stereotypically ‘60s suburban gable front, he reminds himself that everything will work out alright in the end if he can just hang on a little while longer. Lily has gotten much better at covering her tracks over the years, but it helps that Harvey already knows, Marcus doesn’t want to, and Gordon is hardly ever home. Mike doesn’t want to give her much credit, considering the deck is stacked so dramatically in her favor.

Tonight in particular, Gordon is on tour again, due back in three days but probably going to be gone longer; Marcus is at a friend’s house overnight for a “study session,” whatever that’s code for; and if Mike lies still and quiet, he can hear Lily talking softly on the phone.

It’s like she doesn't even care about him anymore.

Rolling over to face the wall, Mike tries to shut her voice out; the words are unclear, but sound still filters through, an indistinct hum just loud enough to be irritating. Mike would hum in response to cover it up, but Harvey isn’t much of a singer.

Instead, he gets back out of bed and traipses downstairs to sit on the porch. It’s chilly but not awful, not windy, and he should be able to stand it in his pajamas for half an hour or so. He isn’t sure if the cold will be good or bad for Harvey’s shoulder, which is extra sore from practice even after all his stretches, but one night won’t make much difference in the long run.

Mike wonders what colleges Harvey is planning to apply to. Harvey won’t let him look at or work on any applications, declaring it to be a form of cheating since Mike’s grades are so much better, and Mike begrudgingly promised to follow his wishes, but he can’t help wondering. Mike’s first choice is Harvard, but he’s pretty sure his pedigree isn’t going to win him any favors; the whole “My parents died when I was 11” essay topic can only get him so far, and he’s learned the hard way that bragging about an eidetic memory is too much of a gamble to trot out for such a big ticket item as the Crimson. Harvey has no plans to go into law, he knows, but is he really going to try to take his baseball career all the way to the pros? Maybe he’ll aim for Stanford or Arizona State; their baseball rankings were pretty good in the late ‘80s. Mike checked.

“Harvey?”

Lily doesn’t sound concerned so much as inconvenienced, but maybe that’s just a side effect of the space between them.

The door opens, and she steps halfway out onto the porch.

“Harvey, honey, it’s late,” she admonishes as Mike crosses his arms and leans forward against the cold. “Go back to bed.”

Mike thins his lips, which is a gesture Harvey approves of, and rocks forward and back, which they haven’t discussed.

“You’ve got school in the morning,” Lily adds, and Mike nods, looking out at the road. They’ll be moving to Boston soon, Harvey’s family; Lily has a new job at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and despite Marcus’s effusive protests, they’re shipping out at the end of the school year. Harvey says he doesn’t care, and Mike doesn’t think it would do him much good to press.

“Come on,” Lily says, leaning forward and offering her hand. Mike stands without uncrossing his arms, pushing past her into the front hall and walking back to Harvey’s room with his head tipped down.

She sighs and doesn’t wish him goodnight, so he returns the favor.

Mike hopes tomorrow will be better.

\---

Time has more or less stopped in its tracks.

Harvey’s shoulder, slow to heal but finally out of its sling, will never fully recover; his college acceptance and rejection letters, a stack of sealed envelopes at the corner of his desk, will never be opened; Mike Ross, the boy he’s never met who is somehow his best friend, will never hear his thanks or his apologies for everything.

The letter is succinct, which is a kindness, and blunt, which is Mike’s style. Harvey stares down at the page and reminds himself that he’s been waiting for this for years.

_I’m sorry, Harvey._

That’s all he needs to read, to be honest, but Mike went to the trouble of writing out so much more; he owes it to him to see it through to the end.

_In a way, this is the best way it could’ve happened, I think. Lily came into the dining room when me and Marcus were eating lunch (I had an egg salad sandwich in case you were wondering) and said that she had something to tell us. She said she and your dad had already talked about it and he wanted to tell you but she thought she ought to do it instead. I knew right away what it was but Marcus seemed to think it was something good._

_She didn’t mention the affair at first. Just that she and your dad were getting a divorce, or “separating.” She said that she still cared about him a lot but she had to be honest, there was someone else, and it wasn’t fair to your dad for her to keep living a lie, I think was how she put it. Marcus asked how long she’d been with this other guy and she was just like “Oh, dear, that’s not important.” I wanted to say it was, but I didn’t. I figured you wouldn’t appreciate it.  
_

_Obviously she’s still moving to Boston and I think Marcus is going with her. I’m not sure what your dad is going to do, I didn’t talk to him. I thought it would be better if I didn’t say anything in case you had something in particular you wanted to say to him, I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression or make it harder for you later._

_Also I feel like I should’ve asked this before but where did you end up deciding to go to college? Stanford is still a pretty good school even if you don’t play baseball. (Your shoulder doesn’t still hurt, does it? How long has it been since you finished physical therapy?)_

Just like Mike to end on a question rather than some empty platitude. Harvey appreciates it insofar as he doesn’t really care what Mike is asking, but the alternative would have been infuriating.

He wishes Mike was here so he could ask some clarifying questions, even though he doesn’t know what they would be. The option would be nice, is all.

He should talk to his dad. Not right now, not first thing in the morning, but soon. Maybe he should wait for his dad to come to him. Does it even matter? Would initiative be better? Does it make a difference that he’s going off to college in the fall, does that change how he should act about all this?

Someone knocks gently on his bedroom door; must be Lily. She ought to be apologizing, or trying to, except she probably doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong.

“Harvey?” she calls hesitantly, and time restarts with a jolt. Folding Mike’s letter into uneven thirds, he shoves it in between a couple of books and bites his tongue.

She knocks again.

“Harvey? Are you awake?”

Can’t put this off forever, no matter how much he’d like to.

“Yeah,” he says listlessly, which she seems to take as an invitation to open the door and come in.

He listens to the door click shut and the awkward silence that follows.

“How are you doing?” she asks, and he almost laughs at her.

“I’ve been better,” he says, and she does laugh, an awkward little giggle.

“You can be mad at me,” she says, “if you want, you have every right to be angry, I understand.”

Harvey presses his hands together in front of his face, closing his eyes tight and taking a sharp breath in through his nose.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says. “I’m not angry at you.”

“Oh, Harvey—”

“I _hate_ you,” he goes on as though she hadn’t interrupted. “I lied for you, for two years; I lied to Marcus, and I lied to Dad, because you asked me to, and for what. For _what._ ”

“Harvey,” she says, and it sounds like admonishment but surely it can’t be, surely not. “You didn’t keep my secret for me, you did it for your father. Don’t pretend you were doing me any favors when we both know the truth.”

Folding his fingers together, Harvey presses his nails into his knuckles and bites his upper lip until he thinks he can control his tone.

“How could you do that to me,” he growls (oh well, it was a good effort). “How could you make me keep a secret like that, how could you put me in that position. You’re supposed to be my _mother._ ”

“Harvey, I—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

Lily sighs, nodding her acceptance.

“I understand,” she murmurs, and no, she doesn’t, but he doesn’t want to argue about this.

“Get out.”

She pauses, as though he’ll change his mind somehow, but there’s no chance of that.

The door clicks shut again and he takes the letter out from between his books.

_I’m sorry, Harvey._

Thanks, Mike. Me too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, Mike sitting out on the porch at night didn't cause or worsen Harvey's shoulder injury in any way.


	8. target

Mike keeps a letter in the back of a drawer in his desk. It’s not any of his conversations with Harvey; those are in a box in the closet where Trevor is less likely to find them as he snoops around for office supplies or test answers or pot. Mike hasn’t reread his and Harvey’s conversations since he started at City College, but they run through his mind sometimes as he dozes off during Econ 103 or Poli-Sci 126.

_Do you think it’s weird we’ve never met? I mean, you’re basically my best friend, and we’ve never even talked on the phone, or been in the same room at the same time._

No, he’d said at the time; no, I don’t think it’s weird, I think it’s fine. I think we do what we have to do.

_So you know how I hurt my rotator cuff? And we were in the championships against, you know, supposedly the other best team in the league? And I’m the best pitcher on our team? Well, guess what. They won without me. Bastards._

It still hurts a little to remember reading that one. Statistically, it’s not like he ever really expected Harvey to make it to the pros, but that was a pretty shitty way to get out of the running.

_I thought about going to Stanford, but since I’m not playing baseball, it feels kind of weird, you know? Like settling, sort of? But I got into NYU, so I’m going there. It sounds awesome. You don’t know any kind of inside information since you live in New York, right? I doubt it. Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to major in yet, but it’s a good school, right, and it’s big, so I’m sure I’ll be fine._

That one always makes him think about the letter.

_Dear Michael James Ross,_

_I am writing to inform you that the Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid cannot at this time make a decision on your application for a place in next year’s entering class. However, because of your outstanding achievements and promise, the Committee has voted to place your name on a waiting list of men and women for whom we hope places may become available later._

He’s good enough. He is. It was just a matter of timing that kept him from getting in the first go around.

Transfer applications to Harvard are due by March first. If he can just make it until then, everything will be fine.

Maybe.

In the Quad, Mike falls to the grass and lies on his back, lacing his fingers behind his head. He and Harvey haven’t switched in awhile. Harvey thinks he’s at Penn State; this’ll be a hell of a shock, when he finds out.

“You’re wasting your potential, Michael!”

That’s what Grammy said, anyway, but maybe Harvey will understand. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to, and there’s nothing to do but suck it up and deal. He couldn’t exactly tell his grandmother that he wasn’t going to any school out of the city because he was worried about her; she’d never allow it, she’d call his concerns stupid and unnecessary. She might think she’s immortal, but Mike knows better, and anyway, this is cheaper. With a scholarship, he’s hardly paying anything at all.

But Harvard, though… He’s wanted to be a lawyer for as long as he can remember, and man, if a Harvard diploma isn’t a leg up into Harvard Law…

What would Harvey say about all this?

He sighs, closing his eyes.

_I trust you._

\---

Trying not to look like he’s quite sleeping his way through Writing for the Social Sciences, Harvey leans his chin in his palm and stares lazily out the window. It’s been a chore, but he hasn’t grilled Mike for lying about where he decided to go to college. Forcing himself to leave it at a simple “Hey man what the fuck,” Harvey’s still trying to decide whether he understands why Mike did what he did; he understands Mike’s perspective, sure, the money and the closeness to Grammy and all, but that part is just quantitative, easy to read. The challenge is seeing the wisdom in it.

For the time being, he feels pretty bad that Mike is going to be subjected to yet another meeting with Dean Bertolami about Harvey settling on a major sooner rather than later. Mike won’t make a decision that big for him (he’s pretty sure), but Mike doesn’t need that kind of guilt tripping, either, especially when his own plan is so completely thought-out.

Or maybe not so thought-out, if that letter is any indication.

He didn’t mean to sneak through Mike’s things; he needed an actual textbook for one of Mike’s classes, searching for it on the off chance that Mike had purchased any of the materials he was supposed to, and the desk was the most obvious place to look for it, and anyway the more important issue is why is Mike holding onto an old _waitlist_ letter?

Harvey can only think of one reason that’s even remotely plausible.

 _Are you going to apply to Harvard again?_ he pencils into Mike’s notebook, the writing sloping and lazier than usual. _Transfer student?_

Harvey isn’t sure what the statistics are relating to transfers from shitty state universities to big-name Ivies, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s gotta be Mike. He deserves it, too, after all he’s put up with, and most importantly, Trevor definitely won’t be there. Trevor the ticking time bomb, whose cheating ways are bound to catch up with him eventually, no matter how finely he claims to have honed his craft, and god help him if Mike gets caught in the middle and Harvey finds out about it.

Harvey smirks, and some other student looks over at him covertly, trying to read what he’s written.

He closes his notebook and resumes staring at the yard.

He hasn’t spoken to his mother since she left, moving out at the beginning of July. At the last minute of the eleventh hour, Marcus decided not to go with her, his first really pragmatic act, but his and Harvey’s relationship is so stilted now that he may as well have. Even when they’re home together, it feels like they’re both alone, spending most of their time cooped up in their rooms and out of each other’s way. Dad hasn’t been home in awhile, either, forgoing spending time with his sons in order to earn enough money to provide for both of them; not because they’re in dire straits, financially, they’re just a little…strained.

Harvey understands. He appreciates the sacrifice, but it would be nice to spend some time with him, that’s all.

Really though, Harvey understands.

Come to think of it, or of the general subject of money, how is Mike planning to pay for Harvard? How many scholarships has he applied for? How many has he gotten? And what’s he going to do about Grammy when he goes? Maybe she’ll move into a nursing home, or an “assisted living facility,” as Harvey’s heard they’re more kindly called. Oh, she would _hate_ that. He wonders if Mike has brought it up to her yet, and how often he calls home, or drops by for a visit; maybe Harvey should swing by after class, just to check up on her. It’s been such a long time, and he thinks he misses her, which may be intrusive but hey, he can’t control his feelings.

Harvey sighs. Folding his arms on top of his desk, he puts his head down and tries not to close his eyes.

He’s not going to fix Mike’s life for him. He’d probably just fuck it up, anyway; the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry and all that.

Besides, he thinks affectionately, if Mike found out what he’d done and wasn’t happy with it, there’d be no inconvenience or force on Earth strong enough to stop him setting things back the way they had been before, and he wouldn’t be shy about telling Harvey that, either. He’s a tough one, that guy.

Harvey would really like to meet him one of these days.

\---

Mike spends probably ninety percent of his time for a full week distracted by anxious anticipation, the sensation of about a dozen needles pricking the back of his brain and then a dozen butterflies hurling themselves suicidally against the lining of his stomach. Harvard started sending out the results of transfer admissions applications on June first, and though he didn’t expect to receive word before that, or even on the actual _day,_ it’s already June _third,_ and don’t they know what this is doing to him, this waiting? After all the last-minute anxiety and second thoughts he had to fight through to send in his application (even though Grammy insisted, over and over, that his education is the most important thing and not to worry about her because she will be _fine,_ Michael, she was born during the Great Depression, for god’s sake, she knows how to take care of herself), they can’t just let him know _now?_

What if he gets in? Did he apply for enough grants? Even with all of them combined, tuition will still be upwards of $20K, and that’s just for _one year._ Grammy might need to move to an assisted living facility, with Mike out of the picture the majority of the time, or at least to a smaller house, or an apartment, and _that’s_ going to cost a shit ton of money, probably, and Mike seriously needs to get his priorities in order because selling tests and borrowing from thugs and loan sharks isn’t going to keep covering his bills forever, and if Grammy ever finds out, he’ll never live it down. Hell, he might not live it down anyway, if he keeps borrowing from guys like Omar who’d just as soon bash his skull in with a lead pipe as see him try to delay paying off a debt.

This was an insane decision. It’s insane, _he’s_ insane, he never should have applied. He’s not going to get in anyway, so he’s really just causing himself a lot of stress for absolutely no reason, none at all.

Oh, god, what _if_ he doesn’t get in? He _has_ to get in, he has to get away from here, this city where so many terrible things have happened, where so much of his life has gone up in flames. He can’t get his Bachelor’s from _City College,_ that’s fucking insane, he’s _way_ too smart for that. Harvey will _never_ forgive him, or stop making fun of him, or reminding him, or, or, or—what, something, some _stuff._ This is awful, this was an awful idea and it doesn’t matter anyway whether he gets in or not because Mike is going to die of apprehension right on the spot.

“Hey!”

Mike’s head jerks around. Trevor. What does he want now? The semester’s over, he can’t be planning to sell any more test answer sheets. Maybe he’s already trying to plan for next term? Well, the guy’s a hell of a businessman, Mike has to give him that, but this is like the _worst_ possible time to bring up his nefarious schemes when Mike is _freaking the fuck out._

As he draws near, Mike sees that he’s holding—an envelope. A heavy-looking envelope, at that, really more of a package, the recipient’s address written out in ink and everything.

Trevor shoves the packet forward with a cocky grin on his face, and what’s he done now?

Wait. Wait just a second. Is that Mike’s name written out in ink above that recipient address?

No way.

When Mike doesn’t take it immediately, Trevor waves the package up and down. “You got into Harvard, dickhead.”

Mike grabs it but doesn’t open it yet; then again, he doesn’t really need to. Everyone knows the difference between the package of acceptance and the envelope of rejection.

“They accepted my transfer?” he asks disbelievingly, and Trevor punches him on the shoulder.

“Yeah they did.”

No fucking way.

“I got into Harvard.”

Trevor starts laughing, but Mike doesn’t care; he got into _Harvard._ Like, actually _got in._ He’s _going to Harvard._

Fuck, he’s going to Harvard.

It’s expensive, it’s far away, it’s rigorous, it’s…it’s been his dream since forever.

He’ll figure it out. Somehow.

“Dude,” Trevor says, whacking him on the shoulder again, “congratulations, man. I gotta talk to a guy about some shit, but I’ll see you later, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Mike replies distantly, trying to determine the package’s weight with just his hands. “Yeah, see you later.”

Wandering dazedly back to his dorm, it occurs to Mike that this is a great excuse for some celebratory weed; then again, he’s feeling the same sort of euphoria without needing to waste his stash, so why bother? He’ll open the package and reply immediately, and then he’ll call Grammy, and then…and then…

Then he’ll write to Harvey.

Harvey will be so proud.

This is _awesome._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Though CUNY City College is today considered somewhat prestigious, in 1999 it was kind of a [disaster](http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/rwg/cuny/pdf/randdrr-2053-1.pdf); when Mike applied, it would’ve been for convenience and cost-effectiveness, not educational value, which is also why he’s so disparaging of getting a degree there.
> 
> Harvey is [canonically](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/159121951984/funny-story-harveys-nyu-diploma-seems-to) a graduate of NYU.
> 
> CUNY City College final exams end near the end of May, but commencement is held at the beginning of June, so it’s a little stretch but not _too_ much for Mike and Trevor to still be on campus at that point. (Plus Mike has another reason to still be there that'll come up later.) Harvard really does send out transfer results on June 1 (or, make them available, but again, 1999; colleges and universities sending out email acceptances didn’t really become the norm until around 2007).
> 
> Harvard’s [tuition](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/2/25/harvard-hikes-tuition-to-32k-up/) for the 1999-2000 semester, including room and board, was $32,164. Mike’s scholarships, totaling $10,415, are an average [Federal Pell Grant](https://www2.ed.gov/finaid/prof/resources/data/1999-2000pell.pdf) ($1,915), a maximum [Iris-Samuel Rothman Scholarship](http://www.iris-samuelrothmanscholarship.org/) ($5,000), a Fantasy [Story of the Year Contest Prize](https://www.storyshares.org/contest) ($500, he wrote a fictionalized account of the switch), and a generous [Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant](https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/grants-scholarships/fseog) ($3,000, he can’t actually apply for it until he’s at Harvard, but he assumes he’ll get it since he has a Pell Grant).


	9. split-second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has mood boards! That…I made… Anyway this is the point in the story where the [first](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/160133989249/on-the-basis-of-ive-always-wanted-art-for-one-of) one fits.

Once he has his wits about him, which takes a couple of minutes, Mike picks up the landline—bright red at Trevor’s insistence—and calls his grandmother, still grinning from ear to ear.

“Hello?” she answers distractedly, and Mike nearly laughs out loud.

“Hey Grammy.”

“Michael!” Her mood is instantly lifted, as though they haven’t spoken in months when in reality it’s only been four days. “How are you, when are you coming back home?”

“Yeah, about that,” he teases, biting down on his smile when she huffs an impatient sigh.

“Don’t jerk me around, dear.”

“No ma’am,” he replies, a habit he picked up from Harvey somewhere along the line. He can’t resist a slight anticipatory pause, but neither can he resist divulging the news:

“I heard back from Harvard today.”

She doesn’t respond immediately; when he doesn’t elaborate, she tries to goad him on.

“Michael…”

Putting his hand over his mouth, he stifles an excited giggle before he answers. “They accepted my transfer.”

“Oh!” she exclaims. “Oh, Michael, that’s wonderful!”

There isn’t even a hint of trepidation in her voice, and Mike suddenly has to be the rational one, the one to remember just how much this is going to change everything (not all for the better).

“Yeah,” he says, trying to hide his edginess as he picks up the phone’s housing unit and begins to pace. “I’ll be able to transfer there for the fall semester next year at the end of August, classes start early September.”

He hears the smile in her tone when she gushes that she’s proud of him, and a weight begins to sink into his stomach.

“Thanks,” he murmurs, wondering if she’ll take his drop in tone to mean he’s still in awe (which, to be fair, he sort of is). “Uh, Grammy…”

“Oh no,” she interrupts right away, and he should’ve known better. “I’ve told you before and I’ll repeat it as many times as I have to until it sinks into that stubborn head of yours, Michael, you put your education first and everything else will fall into place. We’ll figure it out, I can take care of myself for as long as you need.”

“But—“

“ _Michael._ ”

Well, he had to try.

“Congratulations, dear,” she says softly. “I’m very proud of you.”

Tipping his head down, he smiles again. “Thank you.”

She hums agreeably. “Now, I’ll expect to see you home soon before you go off to become the best lawyer this world has ever seen.”

Mike laughs. “Gotta get my Bachelor’s first,” he reminds her, and she makes an unconvinced noise.

“We’ll see,” she dismisses. “Get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll see you when you’re back home. I love you.”

“Love you too, Grammy. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Michael.”

Replacing the phone on his desk and the receiver in its cradle, Mike falls into his chair and drums his fingers on his thighs for a minute before tearing a clean sheet of paper out of his nearest notebook.

_Hey, Harvey. Guess who’s gonna be the best damn pre-law student at the best damn law school around?_

_Harvard accepted my transfer! I know I’m not going to be a pre-law student AT the law school, shut up, that’s not what I meant and you know it. But I’m going to Harvard, man! How awesome is that? I mean it’ll be hard as hell, and I bet they don’t “experiment” the same way the guys do here (pot, I’m talking about pot) (shut up, I only smoked two joints all year, it’s mostly Trevor’s stash, he just keeps it in my desk) but holy shit man I’m going to HARVARD!_

Underlining the word with a dramatic swipe of his pen, Mike tilts his head as he hears Trevor’s key turning in the door. Glancing over his shoulder and catching sight of the clock, he’s surprised to see it’s already a little after six; “a guy about some stuff” keeping Trevor out this late is definitely trouble, and Mike wonders what colorful anecdote he’s bringing home.

One look up at his ashen face erases the lighthearted thought from Mike’s mind.

“Dude,” he says worriedly, his good mood darkening in an instant as he drops his pen and shoves the note into the nearest desk drawer. Trevor only shakes his head and sits on his bed.

“Seriously,” Mike presses, standing and hovering over him. “Are you okay, what happened?”

Narrowing his eyes, Trevor looks up with a tight frown that puts an anxious jolt in Mike’s heart. Trevor isn’t going to _hurt_ him, but whatever happened, he’s definitely blaming Mike for it.

“Campus security,” he grinds out. “Apparently Dean Bonnell somehow got it into his head that I was selling answer sheets during finals.”

“During finals,” Mike repeats. “What, what are they talking about, are they talking about that math test? Dude, are they talking about the math test, how many finals did you _sell?_ ”

“Who fucking knows,” Trevor bites out, “but if I had to guess I’d say yeah, yeah, this probably is about _that math test,_ because how many tests did I sell the hacked answer keys for versus how many tests did I sell someone else’s _perfectly-scored test_ for?”

Mike winces. It was a stupid move on his part to get involved, he knew it at the time and he knows it now, but it’s not like Trevor is guiltless; Mike’s Contemporary Mathematics professor is one of those last-remaining dinosaurs who doesn’t store more on his computer than he has to, including answers keys, so when Trevor needed something to sell to that peppy girl who used to sit across the room from Mike, he had to resort to other means. Mike’s the one who said yes, though, Mike’s the one who should’ve known better and didn’t.

“What are they gonna do to you?” he asks, fearing he already knows where this conversation is going to end.

Trevor offers a vindictive smile, a defense that Mike recognizes to cover his fear, his panic.

“They’re threatening to expel me,” he croaks (he never could hold a façade for long); well, yeah, that’s the obvious course of action. “Mike, you gotta do something.”

“You didn’t tell them about me, did you?” Mike asks, hating himself the moment the words are out of his mouth. Of course Trevor wouldn’t. They look out for each other. “No, shit, sorry man,” he hurries on, “I, I’m sorry, I know you wouldn’t, forget I said that.”

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t,” Trevor snaps anyway, lurching forward, “but I can’t get kicked out of school, Mike, my parents will _kill_ me. I gotta get my degree, I gotta make something of myself, and if I can’t even cut it here, then where the hell am I supposed to go? Mike, you have to help me.”

“I will,” Mike says instantly, “I will, what do you want me to do?”

Shaking his head, Trevor droops over his knees and folds his hands together. “I don’t know,” he murmurs, “I… Someone’s gotta take the fall.” He looks up, raising his eyebrows. “Is anyone else from your class still on campus?”

Mike rocks back on his heels. “You want to pin this on someone else?”

“What else are we supposed to do?”

It’s a weighty question. There’s only one thing they _can_ do, or one thing _Mike_ can do. Trevor knows it, too, and Mike wants to be angry with him for tricking him, guilting him into it, but he’s too much at fault for that.

Mike sighs.

“I’ll take care of it.”

\---

Dean Bonnell’s office opens to visitors at ten.

Mike will be there at ten thirty. Unannounced, but it can’t be helped.

For breakfast, he eats a granola bar and drinks a can of orange juice, just to be sure his stomach won’t start grumbling during the meeting. Trevor books it off campus practically as soon as he wakes up, and Mike tries to boost his confidence as he rereads the letter he wrote to Harvey yesterday, and replays his conversation with his grandmother in his head.

He’s a good student, maintaining a 3.8 GPA without a whole lot of effort; it’s no secret that the college is a mess, and he’s a good specimen for them to show off. Maybe the dean will be easy on him, maybe it won’t be so bad.

He dresses in his best-fitting suit, a grey number that doesn’t look as cheap as it was, a pinstripe shirt and a dark tie. Will Bonnell think he’s being impudent? Mocking? No, casual clothes would be riskier, disrespectful. This is good, this is the right call.

Holding his head up high, Mike walks across campus to the administrative buildings.

Bonnell’s office door is open, and Mike knocks gingerly.

“Sir?”

Bonnell looks up at him, the room’s yellowish lighting putting a glint in his eye that sets Mike on edge right away.

“Mr. Ross,” he says. “Come in.”

Mike clears his throat, fighting to keep from sticking his hands in his pockets (confidence, man) as he sits in one of the chairs in front of Bonnell’s desk.

“Sir,” he begins, making sure to keep eye contact. “I know you offered Trevor Evans a way to avoid expulsion. Well, the reason he didn’t take it is he was trying…”

He breathes out, heavy and stabilizing, trying to ignore the way that smug look hasn’t fallen from Bonnell’s face.

“He was trying to protect me. He’s the one who sold the test, but I’m the one who took it. So, please do not punish him for his loyalty to me.”

Bonnell watches him carefully for a minute or two, bad posture pitching him slightly over his desk as he taps his index finger steadily against its surface. His nails are short, Mike notices, like they’ve been bitten down; it must be stressful working at a college this troubled, and the mayor’s starting to put the screws to CUNY to shape up its act. Maybe he has issues at home, too; Mike hopes he hasn’t added to them.

“Truth is,” Bonnell says eventually, going out of his way to recline in his chair which creaks as the backrest moves with him, “with the way his grades are, I don’t think it will matter, anyway. So, I tell you what.” He shakes his head, pursing his lips. “I’m not going to expel your friend.”

Oh thank god.

Mike sighs again, feeling a tremendous weight lift off his shoulders. “Thank you, sir,” he says. “I—”

“There’s just one thing,” Bonnell carries on, ignoring Mike’s gratitude as the weight settles back down. “You’re his roommate. And you scored perfectly on that test.”

The chair creaks again as Bonnell leans forward, one hand closing around a stack of papers (evidence, Mike’s brain supplies uselessly) as he uses the other to point at Mike as though he wishes he could stab him instead.

“I knew it was you,” he accuses. “I also know you’re only sitting here in front of my face because you think whatever I do to you won’t matter.”

“No, sir,” Mike insists (the weight presses down heavier still). “That’s not true.”

“Well, let me tell you what _is_ true, you little piece of shit,” Bonnell seethes, and Mike’s body freezes in place, every muscle, every joint. “The young woman you sold the test to was my daughter.”

No.

“They’re demanding my resignation.”

A hammer hangs over Bonnell’s desk, ready to drop on Mike’s head, ready to crush him, to destroy him, everything he’s ever been or ever might become.

“And as my last official act,” Bonnell proclaims vindictively, “I’m expelling you from this school. And then, I’m going to call Harvard. Believe me when I tell you, you’re never going there.”

Mike’s chest clenches, the air in his lungs no longer filtering right, the arteries in his heart pumping backwards, his bones cracking under the pressure.

(What did he expect?)

“Now get out of my sight,” Bonnell snarls, and Mike somehow forces himself to stand, somehow forces his legs to carry him to the office door, somehow forces himself not to slam it shut as he walks away, down the hall, out the door into the beautiful sunlight, the gentle breeze of a warm morning in early June.

How could this have happened?

He knows. He does.

He’s the architect of his own downfall.

Back at the dorm, back in his and Trevor’s room, his limbs move mechanically, his brain shifted to autopilot as he digs through his closet and flings everything out onto the floor, his suitcase unearthed last and tossed out into the middle of the mess. Balling up as many shirts as he bothers to fold properly, he fits everything together in the flimsiest of jigsaw puzzles, barely sparing a thought for the books and school supplies he might only just have room for. A couple of notebooks, some pens and pencils, a ruler, stapler, scotch tape; it’s nothing much. The barest essentials.

Sitting on the case’s closed lid as he draws the zipper around its perimeter, he wonders how he’ll break it to Grammy. What kind of lie will he need to spin, what kind of half-truth? She would believe it if he blamed Trevor, but her opinion of him is low enough already; “I was expelled” would launch a full investigation, and Bonnell will definitely go out of his way to be as unkind to Mike as possible. In fact, Bonnell’s probably called her already.

Mike has to tell her. He has to tell her and hope she can find it in her heart to forgive him.

She will, won’t she? She has to. She’s his Grammy.

(He’s been so wrong about so many things lately…)

She’ll forgive him someday, maybe.

Mike pushes his suitcase to the side of his desk and sits in his chair as he opens the closest drawer.

He’ll throw away the note. Harvey doesn’t need to know all the details, Harvey doesn’t need to know what he let slip through his fingers when it was already in his grasp.

He’ll ask, though. He’ll ask, and Mike would never lie to him. He couldn’t, he can’t. Besides, there are a million ways for Harvey to find out, and this is the only one over which Mike has any control at all.

Taking the note out of the drawer, he starts to crumple it up; he’ll tell Harvey, but Harvey doesn’t need to see this, when Mike was so proud and so excited and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Then Mike remembers the letter Harvey wrote him after he found out about his mother, how bare and vulnerable he was, and Mike smooths the page out and flips it over.

Tapping his pen against the desk, Mike tries to figure out where to begin.

_Please don’t hate me for what I’m about to say._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When Mike says he'll be able to transfer "next year," he means next school year, not calendar year. So in like, three months.
> 
> I know I changed the circumstances surrounding Trevor getting “arrested,” but the outcome is the same; the dialogue from Mike’s conversation with the dean is lifted directly from “[The Other Time](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s03e06)” (s03e06), although canonically the dean is never named.


	10. [humiliation]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The contents of Mike's letter to Harvey regarding his CUNY City College expulsion, written on the back of his one-paragraph (and one introductory sentence) note about his Harvard University transfer acceptance (that having been the most accessible paper at the time).

_I really fucked up, Harvey._

_~~I got mixed up in~~ _

_~~Look, man, I know you’ve had it rough since your mom bailed, and I’m not trying to~~ _

_I mean I really fucked up._

_You know how I aced all my finals? ~~Good thing we never swapped on a test day. Sorry, that was~~ Trevor sold my math final to a girl in my class, and it turned out that she’s the dean of students’ daughter. I guess she must really suck at math, because when she aced the test, the professor was suspicious enough to call the dean. ~~I don’t know if he knew Bonnell’s the girl’s father~~ He must’ve known that Bonnell’s the girl’s father; even if they don’t have the same last name (they might, I don’t know) they look enough alike for him to suspect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bonnell’s tried to pull a few strings for her before._

_Anyway somehow they traced it back to Trevor (you can think whatever you want but please don’t say anything about him right now, I’m not in the mood) and he didn’t turn me in, so don’t try to kill him or whatever, it’s not his fault. I bet the girl was trying to save her own ass, she probably gave him up without a fight. Trevor got collared by campus security and the dean threatened to expel him, he came back to our room looking like he’d just had a heart attack. He didn’t ask me to give myself up, that was my idea. He wanted me to help him frame someone else, anyone else from our class, but I ~~wouldn’t~~ couldn’t do it._

_I mean letting her have my answers was wrong, obviously I know that, but Trevor was the one who sold it, and he sold lots of other tests too from any class where someone was willing to buy, but Bonnell wasn’t even serious about expelling him when he made the threat._

_Fuck, that sounds petty. I didn’t mean it the way it came out._

_So I bet you can see where this is going. I went to Bonnell’s office the next morning to turn myself in and ~~I didn’t actually think~~ he told me that he’d had security pick up Trevor just to get to me, he didn’t care about Trevor at all. That’s probably why he didn’t expel him, he figured Trevor’s just another shitty student barely scraping by. If he expelled him, it wouldn’t send any kind of message. I think he’s always had it out for me, actually, he assumes anyone who can ace any class he wants to must be cheating somehow but he could never catch me because, you know, I’m not. So as soon as he saw his opportunity, he took it. Told me he was calling Harvard to make sure I never went there as long as I lived._

_And that’s my story._

_Dammit, I knew it was going to be hard for me to go to Harvard but I was going to do it, I was going to make it happen. I had all these scholarships lined up, there are scholarships for fucking everything. Did you know there’s a scholarship for kids whose parents have died? Because there is, and it’s pretty fucking generous. I guess technically $5000 isn’t a whole lot when your tuition total is over $32,000, but it’s something, and when I have to call them to withdraw, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to land that scholarship again, and that’s assuming I ever get another shot at going to college fucking ANYWHERE. This story is definitely going to get out and every college admissions department in the country will label me a massive threat to the honor code for the rest of my life._

_Harvey, I don’t know what I’m going to do._

_I haven’t told Grammy yet. I bet Bonnell called her, I bet she already knows what happened, but I can’t do this over the phone. I mean I can’t do it in person either, but I owe it to her to tell her face-to-face after everything she’s done to support me. She rides my ass pretty hard, but I know it’s because she loves me. You know what, when I found out my transfer was accepted, I called her right away and she was so excited. I tried to say something about paying for her medical bills ~~and shit~~ but she wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence, she was determined to do whatever she could to help me live out my dream. My dream of going to Harvard, my dream of being a lawyer._

_You know what it is, I think, is that when my parents died, I figured that was the end of my dream, but then my transfer was accepted and I got this second chance and then it all went up in flames because my best friend needed to pay back a dealer for some damn weed. But I can’t even be mad at him. I mean I am, I was, but he’s my best friend, he’s been there for me since forever. He didn’t rat me out even when it would’ve saved his ass for sure._

_Now Trevor is going to get his degree, and I’m going to… ~~something.~~ Nothing. I’ve got nothing left. No new prospects, no more dream. No future._

_My life is a fucking mess, and it’s all my fucking fault._

_Hey, Harvey, if you had to get tied up in someone’s life like this, I’m sorry it’s mine. You don’t deserve all my shitty choices and all my shitty luck. You’ll still make something of yourself, though, I’m sure of it, and don’t worry, I would never do anything to fuck your life up the way I’ve fucked up mine. ~~I promise.~~ I promise._

_And I’m not trying to defend what I did. I just wanted you to hear my side of it, I guess._

_~~I hope you’re having a good day.~~ _

_Good luck, man. With everything you want. You deserve it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mike is referring to the [Iris-Samuel Rothman Scholarship](http://www.iris-samuelrothmanscholarship.org/).


	11. feelings within

Clenching his fists in the pillowcase, Harvey twists his body violently to lie on his other side.

Something is wrong.

The fabric draped over his chest is soft, worn, old; it’s not the stiff cloth of his sheets, specially purchased last summer as part of a matching set (one of three) from Bed Bath & Beyond for his new college residence hall, but nor is it the scratchy generic shit from Mike’s cramped room in the Towers.

Something is very wrong.

Harvey scrapes his nails against the taut fitted sheet beneath him and blinks his eyes open.

Mike’s room. His old room, back in Queens. But isn’t Mike spending the month on campus? Some academic not-quite-a-scholarship thing, mostly special permission he got by spending the semester making nice with the building manager so he wouldn’t have to burden Grammy any longer than necessary with his appetite and his laundry. He was so proud to have pulled it off, too; fuck, did something happen to Grammy?

Sitting up, Harvey takes a moment to look around. It’s exactly the same as the last time he was here; dozens of worn paperbacks on the shelf beside the weary honey-colored desk, a couple of old hardcover textbooks that’ve never been read but Mike hasn’t bothered to get rid of and are probably too outdated now to sell, a rumpled t-shirt peeking out from under the closed closet door.

The top desk drawer is open, only just; a crack no one would have reason to notice if they weren’t looking for it, but Harvey is. He’s learned; they both have.

Harvey climbs out of bed, pausing to grab the t-shirt off the floor and pull it on before he sits to fish out the latest correspondence.

It’s miles longer than Mike’s usual.

Harvey’s eyes narrow as he reads, but the end sets him on edge, slack-jawed and bug-eyed at the blatant self-deprecation, the devaluing of his choices, his efforts, his struggles, his _life._

Oh, Mike.

The confession is full of logical holes; Mike may be blind to Trevor’s selfish intent because of their enduring-against-all-rational-thought friendship, but Harvey sees it clearly. Trevor’s sly enough to know he’d never be able to pin the sale on some poor bastard he’s never met, just as he knew Mike would fall on his sword to save his best friend without a second thought. He played Mike like a grand fucking piano, from the moment he set him up so Trevor could pay off his goddamn _fucking_ pot dealer to the moment he quietly guilted Mike into taking the fall for the both of them.

A red haze blurs the edges of Harvey’s vision; sure, Mike made a shitty decision when he agreed to give Trevor the test answers, but it was Trevor who convinced him to do it, Trevor who facilitated the transaction, _Trevor_ who should’ve been kicked out and cursed to never receive a degree from any college or university in entire the U.S. of A.

The page is already wrinkled for some reason, as though Mike had to hastily shove it away, to hide it, and it makes it easy for Harvey to gather it up in his fist; rage building inside him, collecting behind his forehead, he viciously rips it in half, one piece remaining clutched in his fingers as the other slides through the air to the desktop. Something’s written on the other side, Harvey’s name and then something else; a first draft maybe?

_I’m going to Harvard, man!_

No, no, no no no; tears spring to Harvey’s eyes as he realizes what he’s reading, hot and stinging and filled with righteous fury.

(I just wanted you to know how far I made it before it all went wrong.)

This, all of this is so backwards, so broken and undeserved; Mike warned Harvey not to say anything to Trevor, not to murder him in his sleep because he knows Harvey would, knows he has the want and the will and he _knows,_ somewhere deep inside, he knows that Trevor is to blame, the terrible influence, that _Harvey_ is the one trying to look out for his best interests and do what’s best for him when no one else can. That Edith wants to give him everything in the world but she’s old, getting older, doing everything in her power to help but it’s not nearly enough; that Trevor may be bound to him by circumstance, by accidental closeness, but Harvey is the one bound to him in time, in mind and body and soul; “eternity” if he wants to put it elegantly, “destiny” if he wants to be fatalistic.

Grabbing up the letter, Harvey rips it in half again, then one more time, dropping the pieces down as he slams his fist into the wall as hard as he can, tiny flecks of blood smearing the white paint but not leaving any dent in the solid plaster.

Harvey drops to the floor and wipes his hands across face.

Fuck.

A little later, when he’s strong enough again to bear his own weight, he stands, shuffling to the door and starting downstairs; at the last moment, one foot already on the first step, he turns around and goes to the bathroom instead, turning on the faucet and letting the water run before he takes a drink from the tap.

What time is it? Nearly eight, or maybe nine. It doesn’t really matter; Mike probably doesn’t have any plans. Harvey goes back to his room to see what he can figure out; maybe he’ll go for a run, clear his head. Mike could use the exercise, probably. At the very least, it couldn’t hurt.

The shredded letter lies on the floor, exactly where Harvey left it; well, obviously, but it’s still some kind of surprise, as if this whole morning has been a hoax and the evidence should have gone up in flames the moment he turned his eyes away. Harvey bends down to pick up the pieces.

_It’s all my fucking fault._

Tossing the papers onto Mike’s desk, Harvey sits and starts opening drawers until he finds Mike’s Scotch tape and a straight-edge ruler to smooth out the wrinkles a little.

Mike probably doesn’t want to keep the letter; he may even have expected Harvey to rip it up after he read it, or partway through. The pieces make it look like Harvey is angry, though, or disappointed, and that isn’t right. Not even close.

(Actually, he is angry; livid, even, but not at Mike. Obviously.)

Assembling the fragments as best he can—there’s a small square where four of the pieces meet that’s gone missing, but there’s not much he can do about that—Harvey lays down a long strip of tape that doesn’t quite fall flat, a bump in the middle making it veer off to the right. For the rest of the seams, he uses rows of smaller pieces, which is what he should have done from the first except he hasn’t done crafts projects since elementary school and this sort of thing really doesn’t come up very often, so how was he supposed to know?

It’s something of a mess when he’s finished, but at least the writing is legible.

Harvey folds it into quarters, more or less, and puts it back in the drawer, which he leaves open just a crack.

In the closet, he tracks down a pair of basketball shorts, which Mike owns despite never having played the sport a day in his life, as far as Harvey knows, and Mike’s most athletic sneakers.

Mike could use the exercise.

Harvey could use the air.

\---

The moment Mike wakes, he knows he’s not himself. His body doesn’t have the same heaviness, the same worn-down drear and depression; this is the body of a guy who goes jogging every morning no matter what the weather, not some pathetic washed-up loser who’s suddenly been sent back to square one and didn’t even get to collect his $200 on the way, not that it would’ve made any kind of difference.

Mike flops his head over, away from the wall; Harvey’s alarm clock is buzzing, that awful _bep, bep, bep_ common to every alarm clock ever invented and that Mike hates so, so much. Harvey’s textbooks are shoved into his bookcase in a uniform sort of way that tells Mike he’ll never take them out again unless he has to, that he learned what he was supposed to from the classes and then stopped trying to remember it as soon as he was allowed. If Mike recalls correctly, Harvey is a Linguistics major; Mike asked him why, once, expecting the answer to be something about stalking a cute girl or the professors handing out easy As and finding instead that Harvey, seeking purpose in his life and not having much respect for Psychology as a discipline, wanted to understand, of all things, the art of lying and doublespeak, so Linguistics seemed the obvious answer.

One of the textbooks is called “Language and Mind.” Mike suspects but would never say out loud that the choice of subject all circles back to his mother’s betrayal, which Harvey claims to have put behind him ever since the time he decided, in the middle of winter break and for no obvious reason, that if she ever wants him to forgive her, she’ll have to be the one crawling on bended knee because he sure isn’t going to make the first move.

Mike wonders how well that’s been working out so far.

Then he wonders if Harvey’s awake yet, if he’s found the letter.

He must have. Mike didn’t try too hard to hide it. He isn’t much looking forward to the message he’ll find in response when they switch back. Or maybe he is; that depends on what’s in it, probably.

Mike inhales quickly and sighs a loud puff of air.

“Way to go, Mike,” he says to Harvey’s ceiling. “You’re a real class act.”

When he can’t take it anymore, he gets out of bed to turn off the alarm, looking around for some clue as to the ungodly reason Harvey needed to wake up precisely at six-fifty in the morning. Baseball practice? Probably not, they tend to meet in the afternoon. A date? No, Harvey’s more of a wine-and-dine kind of guy.

Then Mike spies a tank top and pair of shorts folded and set out on Harvey’s desk chair, and oh, yeah, obviously. Jogging in the morning.

He doesn’t want to, but it might be different in a body that’s used to it. Easier, less stressful. When he gets back, he can dive into some of those textbooks, pretend he’s still a diligent student with some kind of goal on the horizon, however hazy and far off. Maybe he’ll even take notes, give Harvey some kind of cheat sheet for future reference.

Mike doesn’t know how far Harvey usually runs, or in what direction; he’ll start off whichever way feels right, and he’ll stop when he feels like he’s about to throw up. That’s how these things always work in books and movies.

As it turns out, nine miles is the limit, more or less. Maybe nine and a half.

Doubled over, heaving and gasping for breath, Mike remembers that he still has to go back the way he came.

Fuuuck.

\---

The room is empty; the lights are off, but he can tell. Thunder rumbles outside and lightning strikes in jagged bolts; the room has no windows, but he can tell.

Harvey’s body is fastened to the seat of his chair, and the room mustn’t be empty because a telephone begins to ring.

 _Shut up,_ Mike thinks sourly. _Shut up._

The telephone rings, and rings, and then it doesn’t.

“Hello?” says a voice somewhat familiar but not quite recognizable. He’s heard it before, Mike has, but not often, not for a long time.

“I see,” the voice murmurs. “And where are the instruments of torture?”

Mikes leans his elbows on his knees—Harvey’s elbows, Harvey’s knees—and puts his face in his hands. (Harvey’s face, Harvey’s hands.)

 _Sure,_ he thinks about saying, _why not. Let me have it._

He decides against it, and the moment has passed.

“There’s nothing breakable here,” the voice snips, “I think you have the wrong number.”

The phone hangs up with a loud crack.

Lightning flashes again, strobe lighting the room, and Mike raises his head just in time to see that oh, yeah, that’s why the voice sounds so familiar.

“Harvey,” Mike says, trying in vain to catch another glimpse of himself standing across the floor.

“Mike?” Harvey replies with Mike’s voice, Mike’s body. “The lights are on, can’t you see?”

Lights? What lights?

“Harvey, I can’t move,” Mike says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

“Just look in the mirror, Mike,” Harvey instructs, so Mike closes his eyes for a moment before he opens them again, just in case something might have changed; thunder rumbles on and on, but the lightning has gone away and the room is dark.

“What’s out there?” Mike asks, pointing toward the wall, unable to see his own hand (Harvey’s hand, don’t mistake it).

“Out there?” Harvey repeats. “Doors. Halls and stairs and doors.”

“And after that,” Mike presses, which makes Harvey snicker.

“That’s all.”

“Is there a door in here?” Mike asks, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice, and Harvey snickers again.

“The door is locked.”

Of course it is.

“Do you have the key?” Mike asks, trying to keep the tears out of his voice, and Harvey sighs wearily.

“Don’t you have any dignity?” he asks in such a way that the question sounds rhetorical.

Mike lunges forward, trying to stand, but the chair is bolted to the floor and Harvey’s legs aren’t broken in the traditional sense (he doesn’t think) but they won’t move, rebelling or otherwise unconnected to his primary motor cortex.

“No!” he barks. “I _don’t_ have any dignity, alright, because what’s the _point_ of being dignified when you’re sorry to be alive in the _first_ place?”

Harvey sighs, his footsteps (Mike’s footsteps) shuffling across the floor but the room is too small for Mike to hear whether he’s moving closer or farther away.

“Do you really mean that?”

“Of course I do!”

Harvey sits then, on the floor, against the wall, and Mike pretends he can make out his silhouette in the corner.

“You really want to die?”

“Yeah!” Mike snaps before he can think better of it, not that thinking would have changed the truth of the word. “Yeah, sometimes!”

Harvey pulls his knees up to his chest, and Mike imagines him resting his hands atop them as he stares off into the dark as though there’s something lurking there.

“Me too,” he says, which sounds odd, frail in a way Mike didn’t know his voice could be. “Sometimes. Especially back then.”

Mike doesn’t need to ask when. He knows Harvey’s “back then”; he has one of his very own, and maybe this is just something that happens to everyone from time to time.

What a charming thought that is.

“Will you do me a favor, though?” Harvey asks, and Mike hums an inquiry that makes Harvey laugh for some reason.

“Would you not?” he asks hopefully. “Not right now, anyway. I’d like to meet you at least once.”

Stop that, Mike wants to order him. Stop it right now, stop pretending to be him saying those things.

“If you still want to die after that, I’d understand,” Harvey says as though it’s a foregone conclusion. “But just give it a little while. A year. Or ten.”

“Or a life,” Mike finishes, which makes Harvey laugh again.

The thunder stops its rumbling, and the phone rings again before hanging itself up.

“I know it’s hard.”

I know you do.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”

It was me, doing this to myself.

“But I’ll find you, eventually. Or you’ll find me.”

Maybe.

“So I think this is a pretty unfair request, but would you wait a little longer?”

I’d wait a lifetime, apparently.

“Thanks.”

\---

When Mikes wakes, it’s the middle of the night, or thereabouts, and all he knows is that he’s just had a tremendously important dream that he’d very much like to remember.

Isn’t that always the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Tower](https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/towers) is CUNY City College’s on-site residence facility.
> 
> Harvey’s college major is never canonically specified; I tried to think of something that would ultimately benefit his role as “closer” without being specifically related to law (e.g., Pre-Law, Political Science, International Relations) and selected Linguistics as basically a specialty in the art of language manipulation.


	12. give-and-take

Today is Tuesday, so it’s been…three days since Mike last ate. Not counting Sunday, which was a switching day when Mike-as-Harvey had to have dinner with Marcus and Gordon to keep them from getting suspicious and Harvey-as-Mike probably ate breakfast lunch and dinner plus an afternoon snack because he’s Harvey and even though he’s no longer an aspiring pro athlete, he cares about the rules for staying healthy.

It’s not a big deal; he feels fine, and besides, he’s saving money on groceries. Grammy is worried about him, but he promises her he’s taking care of himself and asks if she’s taking her medication as prescribed, which is usually a pretty effective way to derail the conversation. Sometimes he threatens to take her to the doctor, but then they just end up arguing, shouting back and forth about this and that, so he’s learned to avoid it.

Laying his hand on his stomach, Mike spins slowly in his desk chair, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about maybe trying to get a part-time job. Not that he has anything he needs to work around, it’s just that looking for full-time right out of the gate feels like asking too much. Restaurants are always hiring waiters, aren’t they, and movie theaters always need ticket takers. There’s plenty out there for a guy willing to ask for it.

Harvey would probably like the idea of Mike getting out of the house to be productive.

Mike figures it might be nice not to be a total bum.

“Michael!”

Shaking his head, Mike hauls himself out of his chair and leans out the bedroom door into the hall.

“Yeah?” he hollers down to the living room.

“Trevor’s on the phone!” Grammy calls back.

“Thanks, I got it!”

He closes the door and picks up the handheld on his desk, collapsing onto his bed before he thumbs the “Talk” button.

“Hey man.”

“Dude,” Trevor says excitedly, which is never a good omen for Mike’s nonexistent-but-increasingly-inevitable rap sheet. “This girl from one of my classes, her cousin’s visiting from Iowa or Idaho or something and they want us to show them the city.”

“Oh my gosh, really?” Mike squeals, pitching his voice high. “Is she like totally smokin’?”

Trevor doesn’t respond immediately and Mike wonders if his sarcasm was obvious enough. “Dude, what the hell,” he goes on at a more normal level, “I don’t have time to spend my day tour guiding some girl you picked up in business class around the Met, I got shit to do.”

It’s a blatant lie, but Trevor won’t call him out. That might not be a healthy part of their relationship, but then again, it’s how they operate; Mike hasn’t called him on the role he played in Mike’s expulsion, so. He doesn’t have a whole lot of room to argue either side.

“Come on, man,” Trevor wheedles. “Let’s sneak into a movie or something, it’ll be just like back in the day.”

“‘Back in the day,’” Mike mimics flatly. “Dude, the girl’s visiting the big city from fuckin’ Idaho, I promise you she’s had a guy’s hand up her skirt in the back of a theater before and you aren’t gonna need a wingman to get her into bed.”

“More fun,” Trevor replies, and Mike shakes his head.

“Man, I’m busy.”

False.

“So forget the girls,” Trevor tries then, “let’s grab a bite or something, CUNY’s getting all…city codified or whatever and I gotta talk to you about these new major requirements, man, it’s total bullshit.”

Oh, wow. Thanks for that.

Mike sighs through his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Can’t,” Mike grits out. “I gotta start looking for work.”

He takes some pleasure in the silence that follows, even though Trevor probably doesn’t realize that he should be feeling pretty guilty right about now.

“Right, my bad,” Trevor says eventually, which is the weakest apology Mike has ever heard and definitely about the wrong thing. “We should hang out though, when you’ve got some free time.”

Yeah, great. I’ll probably have nothing _but_ free time until I’m dead.

“I’ll let you know,” Mike says. “Have fun with Idaho girl.”

“Thanks, man.”

“See you.”

Hanging up the phone, Mike glances out the window; it’s a decent enough day, too hot but not sticky, for once, and while Mike doesn’t think he was serious when he said he was going to look for work right away, or even when he thought about it, it’s…not a terrible idea. It’s a pretty good one, actually. He’s made some bad decisions (a lot of them, recently), but he’s a smart guy; he’ll be able to find _something._ Somewhere. Probably. Maybe.

Grabbing his sneakers, Mike shoves them on his feet as he stumbles down the hall, crouching to tie them before he trots downstairs and retrieves his bike helmet from the closet.

“Going out with Trevor?” Grammy asks when he passes.

“Going to look for work,” he answers, and she raises her eyebrows.

“Already?” she says. “Well. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he calls over his shoulder, shutting the front door behind him.

“Giving up on your education already,” that was what she meant. Mike prefers not to think about it in those terms.

Mounting his bike, he looks up at the house behind him. It could use a little upkeep, but it’s in okay condition, considering he doesn’t know the first thing about home maintenance and Grammy’s attitude tends toward “Leave it be until the roof caves in.”

He wonders how much longer they’ll be able to get by before they have to sell it.

Shaking his head, he starts off toward the Queensboro Bridge.

There’s a library at fifty-eighth street, but the branch at Bryant Park is way bigger; they’ll probably have some information about some work, somewhere, or be able to point him in the right direction. Maybe he can look up some internships or something, research the history of part-time employment or labor laws or…whatever.

The fact is that it doesn’t matter. No school is going to admit him and no workplace is going to hire him; he can send out all the applications he wants, it’ll just be a waste of paper. All he’s really doing by going to Manhattan is escaping his grandmother’s critical eye for the day.

At least it’s a nice ride, and hey, the work definitely exists; maybe it’ll find him instead of the other way around. It’s possible.

Five hours later, he heads back home with his brain crammed full of facts and concepts to write out and stash in his desk drawer.

All this modern Linguistics theory is gonna make Harvey look like a goddamn genius.

He’ll get started on the whole employment thing tomorrow.

\---

Harvey drops his head into his hands and sighs loudly; another student about his age glances over sympathetically before turning back to her own computer terminal, but the grad student sitting at the end of the row glares at him and begins drumming her nails against her keyboard. Fuck her, this paper is _hard._ Mike’s notes have been lifesavers all semester, but Professor Lillehaugen is a fucking sadist. Twelve to fifteen pages on “performativity and authenticity,” what does Harvey know about _performing authentically?_ Half his life is lived in fiction, and even the part that isn’t really kind of is.

Plus, being a sophomore is at least twice as hard as being a freshman. Maybe three times.

Mike would love it, damn him.

No. No, don’t even think that. Things are tough for both of them but Mike is only partly to blame for his situation while it’s completely Harvey’s fault that he’s been slacking off so much, taking Mike’s help for granted, coasting more and more on testing the amount of work he can get away with not doing and utilizing his rapidly increasing skills at manipulating the overconfident idiots surrounding him at all hours.

Things might actually be easier for both of them if he and Mike could switch places a little more often, or for a little longer each time. Or a lot longer. Mike and his ridiculously clear life’s mission would thrive at NYU, and Harvey doesn’t like the things Mike’s been telling him about Grammy—Edith, like the fact that her bronchitis reappeared at the end of October for a grand total of three weeks, or that she won’t say anything about it but Mike is concerned her arthritis is getting worse, but they’re happening whether he wants them to or not, and he’d like to be there for her.

_If you know how to switch places please tell me and maybe we can schedule it better or something._

Would’ve been nice.

He thinks—he’s reasonably sure, actually, that Mike agrees with him, or would if he brought it up. Which he won’t, because it’s impossible and therefore pointless to fantasize about; not that that’s stopped _him,_ but. He doesn’t want to give Mike something else to waste his energy wishing for when it’ll never happen. Mike already seems to be spending all of his free time—all his time, period, time he should be spending on himself, on trying to get his dreams back on track, he spends all that time doing research from the future for Harvey, putting all his energy into giving him an unfair advantage, loaning out his genius brain so his skills can be put to use somewhere, can count for something.

If only Mike was enjoying himself. At all.

“Performativity and authenticity.”

_Hey man, congratulations on the NYU decision, sounds awesome, I’m sure you’ll do great. Let me know when you pick a major, anything I can do to help._

Harvey sighs, the grad student glaring again when he starts flipping through Mike’s annotations on his notes. Whatever, she can go to hell. Mike’s notes are probably a lot more thorough than hers, anyway, she’s just jealous.

_Dude. (I know, I just want to make sure I have your attention.) Dude. Your notes are for shit. I mean I know Jaccard is the most boring lecturer on the planet but seriously you have to give me more than “change = fast.”_

Mike’s been more than just his ace in the hole; he’s been a good influence on him, something any normal student’s parents would notice and appreciate and try to encourage. They’d want to buy Mike a drink, take him out for dinner next time they came to visit their son. Harvey’s glad he doesn’t have to explain away Mike’s nonexistence, but he wouldn’t mind having parents who could show him that kind of gratification, or even taking the guy out for a drink himself to thank him for all he’s done.

_Something going on behind the scenes that you’re not telling me about? I saw that B- on your last analysis, man; it’s one page, you’ve got one every week, it’s a gimme, you’re better than that._

It’s a weird feeling, being accountable to someone else; Harvey’s father was never around enough to take him to task when he slacked off in high school, and Lily was too busy trying to cover up her affair to pay any attention to her children. Harvey remembers the paper Mike was talking about; he’d been out with Paula the night before, a nice girl who drank him under the table but wasn’t particularly interesting beyond that. On the one hand, he’s still embarrassed to have lost his footing over such a waste of his time, but on the other, he’s still embarrassed enough over the mistake to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

_Hey, registration opened today for next semester; I put your name down for Advanced Semantics and that Logic 70 or whatever that you wanted and I was just wondering, are you trying to kill me, or what’s the deal with that? I read that right, that’s a philosophy class, you’re seriously taking an intro philosophy class? I assume so that you can later take another, higher-level philosophy class? So I guess my question is, what the fuck?_

That reaction was a surprise. Harvey expected Mike to appreciate the challenge; he was having so much fun last year, taking his days at NYU and away from City like a treat, and even this year, for most of the fall semester he seemed to enjoy having a chance to get back into the academic environment he was so abruptly kicked out of. Mike is a headstrong guy, Harvey knows (Harvey is too), but they look out for each other, and if Mike is having some kind of problem, Harvey hopes he’d tell him about it. The gradual hostility can’t be _all_ about Harvey’s rocky start, or his occasional slip-ups; sure, it was tough moving up from a lousy public high school in Massachusetts to a big brand-name university, but Harvey’s gotten much better since last year, and even better since the beginning of this semester, mostly thanks to Mike’s help and support.

Mike deserves a lot of credit that he’s not getting.

Mike deserves a lot that he doesn’t have.

“Shit,” Harvey murmurs; the grad student slams her notebooks down on the table and starts shoving papers into her bag as she visibly wills him to have a heart attack, but Harvey doesn’t care. There’s another computer lab for her, if she’s so desperate, and anyway, he doesn’t have any respect for that brand of passive-aggressive bullshit.

As she stalks out, he flips his notebook open to a blank page and scrounges around in his backpack for a pen.

_Mike, I’m sorry for everything._

Harvey wonders if anyone’s said that yet. If Trevor’s gotten around to it, or if he ever will.

Tapping the pen against the page, he thinks carefully about his next move.

_I’m sorry I haven’t appreciated your work more. I’m sorry you’re not getting credit, real credit that everyone can see, for everything you’re doing and everything you’ve done. I’m sorry you only get to go to school once every couple of days and you don’t get to study pre-law like you always wanted. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix your problems before they started._

It’s true, it’s all true.

It’s true, but it’s not enough.

Harvey mindlessly doodles a tiny circle in the upper right corner of the page.

_I’m doing my best to make you proud. I wasn’t before because I didn’t get it, but now I think I do, and I’m trying to be good enough to deserve everything you’re doing for me._

He taps the pen against the desk and bites his lower lip.

_Thank you._

Looking down at the words for another minute, Harvey nods slowly before packing up his books, ejecting his floppy disk from the computer, and making his way back to the dormitories. It’s a good note; Mike should know that his efforts, his hard work are appreciated, that he’s still doing some good with his time, with his life.

It’s a good note, he tells himself as he rummages in the common refrigerator and claims a container of yogurt that he happens to know belongs to Jeffrey McNamara but doesn’t have his name on it so to hell with him.

It’s good, he tells himself as he lies in bed with his eyes closed, trying his best to stop tossing and turning because he’s just making it harder for himself to fall asleep.

It’s shit. It’s pandering and condescending and Mike will hate it.

Shoving his covers down and doing his best not to get his legs so tangled that he falls flat on his ass, Harvey pushes himself out of bed and fumbles in the dim toward his desk, where his notebook is open to the note because he wanted it to be the first thing Mike saw when he went to gather Harvey’s books for class (if he even bothers with all that; come to think of it, Harvey isn’t sure).

He picks up the notebook and rips out the page, balling it up and tossing it into the trash, which isn't a very secure hiding place but he's tired, and it's good enough for now.

Maybe tomorrow he’ll take it to the bathroom and burn it.

Or something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mike has mild to moderate depression (not eating, not socializing, losing interest in the tasks he sets himself, having the perspective that he’s doomed to failure no matter what he does), which I think is pretty reasonable after getting expelled thanks to his best friend and thinking his lifelong dreams have been dashed forever.
> 
> Also NO, Paula who drinks Harvey under the table is _not_ Paula Agard; this chapter was written well before _that_ became a thing. I took the name from Paula Merral in the _Psych_ episode "Dual Spires."


	13. meanwhile

Some of the librarians have started to greet Mike by name.

The other day, that one homeless guy who’s always hanging out in the Medieval History section asked him about his dissertation, and Mike had to explain that he’s not the city’s youngest graduate student, he just likes to read; turns out the homeless guy, whose name is Philip, used to be a bike messenger before he got into an accident that lost him his job, and his shitty apartment in Harlem when medical bills emptied his bank account, and his girlfriend Sarah when he found out that she had cheated on him while he was in the hospital and then for awhile afterwards too. Mike said he was sorry to hear that and tried to think of a way to ask, without sounding heartless, if the company Philip used to work for was hiring; he couldn’t come up with anything, but then Philip vindictively mentioned that they’ve since gone out of business, and that was the end of that.

If Mike could, if the building was open and he was allowed, he would spend all his time at the library, where everyone assumes he’s doing something productive for no other reason than that he’s there, and why would someone spend all his time at the library if he has no intention of being productive? Or to get out of the cold, except that it’s May, or to get out of the heat, except that temperatures this week are fluctuating between fifty and sixty-seven degrees, which is actually quite a pleasant range. Besides that, unlike Philip, who does the best that he can, Mike looks a little too well-groomed and dresses a little too nicely to be the type of person who needs to resort to whiling away his days in a climate-controlled public facility.

The library isn’t open twenty-four seven, though, and at the moment, it’s eleven forty-four at night, so it’s been closed for going on five hours. Mike’s bed is comfortable—it _is_ —but it’s difficult to sleep when there’s a drug deal (he’s pretty sure that’s what it is) going on outside his open window, occasionally interrupted by the loud clanging of zinc against steel as sanitation workers dump overflowing garbage cans into the back of their truck, rumble down a few blocks, and repeat. It’s not even the noise that’s bothersome so much as the idea that there’s all this _stuff_ happening outside, people doing _things,_ having _lives._

Mike wants to do things; Mike wants to have a life. He does.

Asterisk-not-really.

It’s Mike’s fault, he knows, that he doesn’t have one, but it’s easier to attribute the blame to the nonspecific “other” than to face up to what he’s done. Anyway he’s better off now just giving Harvey a massive leg up instead of trying to “help himself” or whatever, because even if Harvey doesn’t know where he wants to go or how he’s going to get there, at least he has a chance to make something of himself, and Mike wouldn’t mind being a part of that.

A noise like a police siren starts wailing, which is in fact just an obnoxious kid with a bullhorn that makes a few different sound effects (Mike knows this because the kid has been hanging out in the park a couple of blocks away every night for the past week or so, turning on either a police siren or an air raid siren and then making unintelligible but rebuking-sounding announcements for a few minutes before he turns the siren on for awhile longer, determines his task to be accomplished, and goes home); the guys on the street apparently don’t hang around this neighborhood enough to know about the stupid kid and his stupid bullhorn, not to mention they’re probably just beginners to the whole drug trafficking game, so they stupidly shout words like “Fuck!” and “Run!” to each other before scattering to the winds.

Mike throws off his blankets and goes to the window, bracing his palms on the sill as he looks out into the night. Everyone he heard seems to have gone, though when he squints, he can make out the glow of the sanitation truck’s break lights shining around the corner.

Midnight.

Mike feels sort of bad for those guys who have to work at this hour; then again, he’s heard that their benefits are pretty good, and they’ve probably spent awhile working their social lives around their backwards time schedules, so maybe he doesn’t feel too bad for them. Plus it might be nice to work in the dead of night, when everything is dark and still and calm, and stuff has a shot at making sense.

Mike wouldn’t mind being a part of that.

Opening the closet, he reaches in for a t-shirt and then makes sure to keep to the middle of the hall where the floor is settled and less likely to creak as he creeps downstairs, picking up his sneakers on the way out the front door and locking up behind himself as quietly as possible (even though Grammy is unlikely to hear it upstairs, in her bedroom with the door closed). Shoving his feet into his shoes, he starts walking, his shoulders hunched over slightly even as he keeps his head up and his eyes forward.

There’s Tess’s house across the street; well, her parents’, anyway. When she went to college somewhere on the west coast, she pretty much forgot that they could keep in touch if they wanted, and even though Mike spent a decent amount of the time through high school that they dated waiting for it to end, it still hurts a little. Trevor, on the other hand, Trevor still spends his breaks at home, and a lot of his weekends too, sometimes pushing Mike to hang out and do stuff and sometimes not. There was one time that Mike was the initiator, but only one.

When he walks by the Palladinos’ place, their German Shepherd, chained up in the front yard, starts barking, and Mike doesn’t think he’s scared of dogs, particularly, but just for the moment, he isn’t completely sure.

That’s the thing about the dead of night.

Everything has a shot at making sense.

\---

On the fourth floor of 10 Washington Place, which is the highest floor he’s ever been to even though the building is six stories and he’s been studying there for nearly three years now, Harvey crouches over a small desk in the back row in room 401, pressing pen to paper, feeling the unease of the other students surrounding him (all similarly crouched over their small desks, wishing they had memorized this poem instead of that one, hoping they’re remembering these fluctuating linguistic trends right, calculating the lowest grade they can get away with earning on this final exam without decimating their GPA). All their faces are vaguely familiar, recognizable the way a man who always takes the same subway at the same time every day but never interacts with any other passengers has a vaguely familiar face with no context behind it, no deeper meaning. Others make up stories for him, pretending they know what he’s been through, what he’s surviving, but they don’t know, and they never will, which is how Harvey prefers things.

_Would you just STOP?_

Harvey’s exam is at least ninety percent complete and he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s written for any of it. Fortunately, or quite unfortunately, depending on how much thought he’s willing to put into it, he doesn’t remotely care; he’s intelligent enough to be confident in his grasp of the material, weary enough to acknowledge that he’ll be satisfied with a mere passing grade, and far too preoccupied with other matters to focus his attention for long on something he’s since forgotten the importance of and in which he has a hard time seeing any purpose.

_I’ve been getting by fine on my own and if you keep trying to “fix” my life or whatever while you’re still living yours (which by the way I’m working my ass off to help you with, so don’t just tell me to give that up), we’re both going to be fucked._

Cramping his handwriting as small as possible while still maintaining some façade of legibility, Harvey scribbles out the end of the sentence about morphology or whatever and closes his blue book. Reviewing his work would take another half hour, at least, and he could probably fill another two or three pages if he wanted to really blow his professors’ minds; on the other hand, a fly or a gnat, or both, has been buzzing around the ceiling for the past half hour, and this room doesn’t have air conditioning, and Harvey is really nostalgically in the mood for a Rocket Pop, so with way too much vigor, he slaps his books and papers into a little stack, marches them up to the proctor’s desk, and drops them down in front of him before walking right out the door.

_So me a favor, okay, and just leave it alone._

A shaved ice cart is parked in Washington Square Park, its presence probably responsible for the subliminally planted notion in his brain of a Rocket Pop; Harvey fishes some change out of his pocket for a paper cup of coconut ice and sits on a bench where his view of the Linguistics building is obscured by the trees overhead.

What’s Mike’s favorite flavor of shaved ice? He’s lived in the city all his life, he must have one; is it cherry? Or maybe mango. They’ve never discussed it, but Harvey thinks it might be mango. Or rainbow, since he probably started eating them when he was a kid and might’ve gotten into the habit.

Then again, Harvey has no idea, since they’ve never discussed it. There are a lot of things they’ve never discussed and they’ve still managed to get by okay.

It wasn’t even a big deal, what set Mike off. Harvey doesn’t think so, anyway; Mike was so uptight about Harvey’s Philosophy courses, always bitching about The Nature of Values whenever he had to sit in on a lecture, Harvey figured it might be nice to take a class Mike was interested in, vaguely suggesting something in politics or economics, or maybe a literature intensive since Mike likes to read so much.

_Are you fucking pandering to me?_

No, Harvey had tried to explain, no, he just wanted Mike to be happy, and since he was going to be pre-law, these courses sounded like they might be interesting for him, or maybe even useful down the line, because plans get derailed all the time but you never know, right?

The timing on that one was shit, is the problem. The morning after, Harvey had woken with every regretful intent to scrap the note and rewrite something less…defensive, but he’d woken up in Mike’s body in Mike’s bedroom with Mike’s reminder notice stuck to the mirror to start looking into nice-but-affordable assisted living facilities for Grammy and there’d been nothing for Harvey to do but wait and try not to panic.

Harvey’s still sort of angry with himself for being arrogant enough to think he knew everything about Mike, or enough to make the sort of presumption that he had; he has the feeling that he’s made that same mistake before and it hurts that he didn’t learn from it. Still, Mike could’ve been nicer about it. Well, whatever; making excuses isn’t going to help anyone.

Harvey crushes the paper cup in his fist, a trickle of sticky coconut-flavored syrup running over his thumb and down his wrist as he drops his arms to his thighs and wonders what Mike is doing right now. They haven’t spoken in awhile, groaning in frustration every time they wake in an unfamiliar bed but hauling ass to make the best of a bad situation, putting on their acts and trying to stay out of the limelight as long as they can get away with before calling in an early night. Harvey only knows that he and Mike have been acting much the same because of all the comments he fields the next day about his bad mood, most of them rebuking with the rare “You feeling better?” tossed in, typically by some jackass who’s three weeks ahead on readings, already drafted her next essay, and seeking an opportunity to show off just how much she’s got her shit together.

He tosses the paper cup into a garbage can and licks his hand, wiping it off on his jeans and hooking his thumbs through his belt loops.

Things were so much simpler back in the day.

Well, he’s said that before.

Things might be simpler now if he and Mike could sit down face-to-face for an actual discussion.

He’s said that before, too.

Walking idly into the center of the park, Harvey sits on the edge of the fountain and trails his hand in the water to rinse off the last tacky residue, ignoring the way it splashes against his knees and soaks the hem of his shirt.

Dear Harvey: Do better.

Note to self: I’ll try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After Mike gets expelled, nothing canonically specific happens to either him or Harvey in their respective timelines for like, seven years, so the previous chapter and this one skate through a lot of time really quickly (which is also why it might seem like not a lot is going on).


	14. separation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first section takes place around 2002, the second in the summer of 1993, and the third in 2005, because I'm impatiently rushing along to 2007.

Here comes Trevor, decked out in his halfway decent storm blue suit jacket and too-short trouser cuffs, black socks and spit-polished loafers, trying to be fashionable by pretending not to need to try at all as he saunters down the block like he has something to be proud of, something he’s accomplished, something Mike will think is just the goddamn bee’s knees. Mike hopes it’s not another drug deal, but he knows better, so he doesn’t hope too hard. They’ve been friends too many years for him to bother trying to fool himself. Anyway, Trevor might not be doing something that most of society would call “reputable,” but at least he’s found a way to build a sort of business for himself. He’s making money, making his way.

What would happen if Trevor had real ambition? If he wanted to do something with his life that he could brag about to people other than Mike, if he wanted to build on accomplishments that didn’t translate into a prison sentence?

Well, that’s a lovely thought, yes, and one Grammy would surely approve of; maybe then she would stop scowling and making those disapproving noises when Trevor came by to bring Mike on an adventure (unspecified)—not that she’s ever been able to stop them spending time together, nor made any actual effort to do so, having faith as she does (perhaps misplaced) in Mike’s ability to see reason and ultimately do what’s best for himself.

It won’t happen, though; not right now, at least, when Trevor is just about finished convincing himself that he’s good enough to get by doing this forever, that he can live in this dream until he dies, or wakes up, which amount to about the same.

Mike isn’t looking forward to that day. He’s woken up from his own dream, the sparkle and shine worn off of the game they were playing under the strain of a ridiculous circumstance, the inevitability of everything good turning to dirt, and he wishes he had died instead. No, not really, he doesn’t. Only sometimes.

_~~I wish I was dead.~~ _ ~~~~

It all comes back to this.

\---

Two months and three days after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude (thanks to Mike, no doubt about that), Harvey receives his diploma in the mail in a large flat envelope that has the words “DO NOT BEND” printed in the lower right corner in what looks like Times New Roman font, black. He’d been up in arms about its arrival (or lack thereof) for the first week or so, even storming the registrar’s office to ask when it would show up, but now that it’s appeared on his doorstep, his immediate response isn’t relief or excitement but fear that NYU has sent a “reminder” of an outstanding tuition balance he didn’t know about, dreading the contents until it occurs to him that maybe he should’ve been waiting for this. Eagerly anticipating.

He’ll take it to Jack’s tomorrow to have it framed, maybe hang it in his bedroom. That’s what people do with things like this, things they’re proud of.

He’s proud of what it represents, at least. The life he’s building instead of the one he left behind.

_In a way, this is the best way it could’ve happened, I think._

I think so, too.

Tossing the diploma and the rest of the mail on the counter next to the kitchen sink, Harvey shuffles about five feet across the floor to his scuffed white particleboard desk and sits, putting his hands over his face as he sighs into his palms. He doesn’t remotely regret cutting ties with his mother, but Marcus seems to have decided that Harvey isn’t worth his time because of it; who knows what lies she’s fed him while Harvey’s been away, what kind of shit she’s been talking while he’s just trying to make something worthwhile of himself.

Harvey sighs again and picks up his nicest rollerball.

_I got a part-time internship with the Broadway Mall Association today. It looks like crap; there was a flyer on a bulletin board in one of the buildings at NYU, I forget which one, and I figured I’d apply just for the hell of it, you know? It took forever for her to get back to me, the woman in charge of that office, but then she interviewed me for about five minutes and hired me right on the spot. That’s suspicious, right? She’s too desperate, don’t you think? She was the only one there when I went in, I think she might even be the only person who physically works there in that office in that building (which I think is also a church somehow, the organization seems pretty low-end, but I guess that’s what you get from local government even though I would expect more from a big city like New York). I don’t want to take it, but I’ve got it, so maybe I should. Something is better than nothing, all that shit. There’s no money, but it’s experience, you know, something I can put on my resume. What do you think I should do?_

_I should say one other thing before you decide: I applied for another job today, one that would actually pay money. If I get it, I mean. And not a lot, but, you know, more than zero. It actually looks pretty shitty too, it doesn’t make any use of my degree or anything (what the fuck do you do with a Linguistics degree), but at least it pays. And I had this one professor, I forget which one, some woman, who said that it’s important for kids to build their ways up to careers, that they need to have a bunch of shitty low-end jobs before they can make it big so they understand their roots or something? I’m not really sure she even gave a reason, all I remember is that she said that she had to work her ass off to get where she is and young people have it too easy these days._

_Whatever, so this job, it’s in the mail room at this law firm called Gordon Schmidt Van Dyke. I know what you’re going to say, but I didn’t just apply because it’s a law firm. Because of you, I mean. I was dicking around at the library on 58th street and then I started walking downtown, because I didn’t want to accidentally walk all the way back to Morningside Heights (I know it’s probably not the kind of thing that I’d do by accident but it COULD happen), and I kind of have this dream or fantasy or whatever you want to call it of living on Lexington or Park or one of those fancy streets. ~~Really show my mom up.~~ I guess the firm owns a few floors in the building it’s in—Lex and fifty-something, I forget the exact address—because their name is printed pretty big on the directory next to the door, and as soon as I saw “Gordon,” I had to check it out. Well, I didn’t have to, I mean ~~it felt like a sign sort of~~ I thought it couldn’t hurt, you know, because what do I have to lose? Nothing, pretty much. And then it turned out they were hiring mail clerks! Lucky break, right? They had openings for associates, too, and paralegals, but I mean…_

_So anyway I submitted an application ( nothing to lose) and we’ll see how that goes. I know it’s pretty low-end, but I kind of hope I get it. Money, for one thing; not good money, but at least it’s a paycheck. And I think I’ll like being in that area; if I can’t live somewhere high-end, might as well work there, you know? ~~And I thought you might like that it’s a law firm.  
~~_

_~~Sorry, that was shitty of me. I really didn’t mean to rub it in didn’t mean to say that didn’t mean to~~ _

_I’ll let you know if I get it. Who knows, maybe I’ll be the office manager one day. Or the equipment manager! Do law firms have equipment managers? Is equipment manager above or below officer manager? Below, probably. I don’t know. How do you even get promoted from mail clerk, what’s the level above that? Is there even a level above that, or do you have to transfer to a completely separate department? Does the mail room only have lateral movement? I should do some research before my interview. Do you think they’ll make me interview? Is this even a skilled position?_

_So, that’s what’s going on right now. I hope you’re doing okay._

Harvey caps his rollerball and folds the letter into thirds, carefully creasing the seams with his thumbnail. When they’re sharp enough that the paper might as well be perforated, he opens the bottom drawer of the rattling steel filing cabinet he keeps on the righthand side of his desk, crammed full of file folders but nearly empty of content except about two dozen copies of his résumé printed on off-white professional-quality cardstock.

Concealed underneath the file folders in the bottom drawer is a string and button envelope containing perhaps fifteen sheets of paper folded into thirds and creased so sharp they may as well be perforated. Harvey slides the letter in his hand into the envelope with all the others and reseals it, returning it to the bottom of the drawer with reasonable confidence that Mike will never find it or bother to look.

Closing the drawer, he opens a spiral notebook with a matte navy cover and uncaps a cheap Bic, writing without thinking too hard about the words:

_I applied for a job today in the mail room at a pretty big corporation; hope I get it, I’ll let you know. I tell you what, my first paycheck is going right in a savings account to get me out of this hellhole._

Yeah, that’s about right.

\---

These sorts of things want for cause and effect. Alright. Hoping to celebrate his successful graduation (how the hell did _that_ happen; more than a few failing grades compensated for with two extra years of study, is how), Trevor comes to Mike’s house with no pretense, no suit jacket, no loafers, no three-hundred-dollar haircut or well-oiled briefcase or solid gold cufflinks. He comes with a shit-eating grin and a threadbare backpack with a smiley face keychain hanging from the outside pocket zipper. Grammy lets him in with a hardened smile and directs him right up to Mike’s room without a single superfluous word, which Trevor doesn’t mind in the slightest, and he’s hardly even up the stairs before he swings the backpack around to his front and unzips it to pull out a plastic bag full of definitely-not-oregano.

It’s the finest product Trevor’s produced yet, no doubt about that; Mike shuts his bedroom door and opens the window as wide as it’ll go as though that will stop the smell from leaking down to the living room where Grammy’s probably sitting on the sofa with a good book open in her lap as she pretends she isn’t harboring a couple of minor criminals. Trevor winks for an abnormally long time as he flicks his lighter on and waggles it in front of Mike’s face, eventually lighting the joint held between his lips and sucking in deep before he offers to share.

They’ve done this a dozen times, or a hundred, maybe a thousand or a million (not that it matters); Mike used to say “Alright man, but this is the last time” before they started, and Trevor used to say “Yeah, yeah, of course” in a real sincere tone of voice, but neither of them ever believed it and then one day Mike just didn’t say anything, and that was the moment it started becoming part of life instead of some kind of recreational dalliance.

That was around the time—the same time, actually, the same time exactly that Mike began pairing his weed with a notebook, a glossy black college-ruled number that he always writes in with one of the fifty-odd Commerce Bank-branded retractable pens that always seems to linger around his room. Sometimes he reads out loud as he writes, which Trevor never remembers in the slightest, and sometimes he doesn’t, which Trevor sometimes complains about, but the same thing always happens to the notes when all is said and done: Mike wakes up the next day, finds a page torn from the glossy black notebook and slapped down decisively on his desk, skims it until he remembers what it’s going to say (even if he doesn’t exactly remember having written it), and flushes the ashes down the toilet.

He wishes he could flush the words out of his brain, too, but that’s the thing about having an eidetic memory, isn’t it.

_Harvey, my man, I need you to do me a favor okay I need you to **PROMISE ME** that if I ever say I’m going into business with this dude Trevor Evans you will find me and you will kill me okay? I’m in New York, right, so you’re gonna kill me, yeah, okay? Awesome thanks_

As though Mike would ever turn on Trevor. He vaguely recollects the conversation that preceded that particular letter; “it was just like on TV” had been a recurring theme, mostly in reference to the shooting of degenerates and low-level drug dealers on cop shows ( _Law & Order_ being the prevalent example) as Trevor waxed poetic (as much as possible in his compromised state) about his latest efforts to acquire pot as a middleman attempting to climb the corporate ladder (or whatever the narcotics underworld’s version is called). For all his malaise and increasingly frequent periods of hopelessness, though, Mike has never particularly wanted to do anything for the expressed purpose of dying; leave it to the weed to make him skew a detached interest in the subject into a viable means of breaking off a lifelong friendship.

**_I AM DOOMED!!!_ **

Far and away the most melodramatic thing he’s ever written (and hopefully will ever write). He tells himself over and over that he didn’t mean it quite the way it came out, more in a general “my fate, whatever it is, is inescapable” sort of sense, and eventually he isn’t completely sure that he ever _did_ mean it any other way, so consider that battle won. (The little voice murmuring that he meant in fact everything _but_ that is kept in a lock box to which the key has been thrown away.)

_Let’s choose executors and talk of wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath, save our deposed bodies to the ground? (Richard II 3.2.148.)_

Trevor nods solemnly as Mike recites the words while he writes, managing to cram the whole phrase onto a single line (just barely).

“Dude,” he avows, “heavy.”

Mike looks up abruptly.

“Harvey?” he asks, and Trevor tips his head back.

“ _Dude._ ”

Oh.

No, it’s fine. Never mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Jack’s Art Gallery](http://www.jacksartframing.com/) is a neighborhood framing and poster/print shop on Broadway and 111th that isn’t super expensive and does good quality work.
> 
> [The 58th Street Library](https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/58th-street) is between Park and Lexington. As a point of interest, 601 Lexington Avenue, the address of the building that serves as the exterior shot for Gordon Schmitt Van Dyke (and all subsequent incarnations thereof), is between Lexington and Third Avenue. 25 Cooper Square, the address of The Standard (the hotel from which the view from Harvey’s apartment was filmed), is off Third. Morningside Heights (110th Street to 125th Street on the west side of Manhattan) in the early 1990s was a pretty cheap neighborhood; Harvey would’ve been able to get an apartment there right out of college, but the paint on his walls would’ve been peeling and the floor would’ve been warped and basically he’d want to move out ASAP.
> 
> Incidentally, the level above mail clerk is postmaster.
> 
> [Commerce Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Bancorp), purchased in 2007 by [TD Bank, N.A.](https://www.tdbank.com), dispensed free retractable pens at its branch locations; like TD Bank retractable pens today, they were absolutely _everywhere._
> 
> Shakespeare, William. _The Works of William Shakespeare._ New York: Black Reader’s Service Company, 1937. Print.


	15. allies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place in 2006.

The royal blue polyester machine-tufted carpet (looks like cheap wool) covers a third of the floor, maybe, wedged underneath a brown polyester fold-out couch (looks like cheap crushed velvet) bulging with overstuffing; three cheap plastic TV trays piled high with takeout containers and scraps of leftovers cluster in the corner, a black canvas folding chair cradles a huge pair of headphones and a week’s worth of free newspapers, a black denim jacket lies carelessly over a tin radiator that’s likely (hopefully) out of order. Harvey’s hands—Mike’s hands are shoved under his face, his eyes shut tight against the sunlight that shouldn’t be hitting at this angle, shouldn’t stretch so far across the floor.

Curling forward, his knees nearly touching his nose, Harvey flexes his deltoids and yawns; he’s been here once before, when the couch had fewer stains, the takeout was Chinese instead of Mexican, the denim jacket was a flannel shirt intentionally poked full of holes. The changes are superficial, but then, Trevor’s a pretty one-note kind of guy.

He isn’t sure what he’s doing here now, though, what Mike was doing spending the night under Trevor’s roof. A moment of panic—has something happened to Grammy?—passes quickly enough; surely the signs would have been there, surely Mike would have mentioned something. But are they fighting? Did she throw him out? No, she wouldn’t, she would never. Mike ran away? _Maybe…_ but, think about it for a second, just a second, and no, he’s not a _child._

“Rise and shine, asshole,” Trevor chastises, rubbing his eye. “You getting out of here sometime today?”

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Harvey squirms away from the comforter (far too heavy for this weather), banging his heels against the floor as he finds that he’s not lying on a bed so much as a futon that probably has less padding in it than the blanket still tangled around his legs. Raking his hands through his hair, he twitches when Trevor kicks at the mattress, catching Harvey’s thigh with the tip of his shoe (dressed and prepped as though he has anywhere important to be).

“Time is it?” Harvey asks as he rubs his ankle. Trevor kicks the mattress again.

“Almost eight,” he says, and Harvey groans. His head isn’t pounding, so Mike didn’t drink himself stupid last night, but everything is a little bit cloudy, a little bit soft; he was probably high when he fell asleep.

“Come on,” Trevor says as he picks at some of the leftovers on one of the TV trays, popping a wad of something into his mouth. “Hurry up, I gotta get going.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harvey grumbles. Mike fell asleep in his clothes, which on the one hand makes Harvey feel grimy and a little stale, but on the other means he doesn’t have to worry about finding his pants tossed over the ceiling fan; he knows that more than once, Mike and Trevor have fucked around during these little pot parties, which is fine—well, would be fine if it was with anyone other than Trevor, but the point is that Harvey’s glad he doesn’t have to worry about riding the subway back to Queens with Trevor’s stench all over him.

Quite a life Mike’s leading here.

Come on, man, that’s not fair.

“You got any deliveries today?” Trevor asks as he picks up his cheap briefcase. Deliveries? Mike must’ve gotten that bike messenger job he was talking about; good for him.

“They’ll call me,” Harvey dismisses; it sounds true, at least. Mike didn’t leave any note that he can see, so he can’t be held responsible. “Hey, where’s the closest M from here?”

Trevor scoffs. “Shit, man, I dunno,” he mutters. “Twenty-third? Dude, when’re you gonna move into the _city,_ that’s where all the _action_ is.”

“Soon as they price me out of that house,” Harvey retorts flippantly, hoping Trevor doesn’t know to take him at his word. It’s a good bet; Trevor just rolls his eyes and waves Harvey toward the door, keeping pace with him down five flights of stairs to the front door where he immediately puffs his chest up and walks away. Harvey isn’t exactly sure where he is, but some of the architecture is familiar from his NYU days, and he orients himself well enough to find the train.

Counting the stations back to Queens, Harvey wonders distantly where he’ll be, where he is in the year 2006, if there’s any chance he’ll run into himself somewhere in the city. If he’s still slaving away in the mailroom, if he’s saved up enough to move out of his shitty walkup, if he’s established himself well enough to stop living paycheck to paycheck. If he’s found some kind of purpose in his life, something to make him happy.

It’s kind of a lot to ask.

The train pulls into Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues and Harvey walks to the nearest corner, flashing back to 1992 (or is it 1982?) and wandering around until he stumbles upon a stop along the Q29. The bus takes its typical fifteen minutes showing up, but the ride is mercifully short; the stop is exactly as Harvey remembers, the neighborhood remarkably unchanged.

Mike’s house has started showing wear, the yard gradually becoming unkempt. The screen door creaks on its hinges and the wooden door sticks in its frame.

Grammy looks up when Harvey shuffles into the hall.

“Nice night?” she asks, closing the book in her lap.

“Not particularly,” he says. “Sorry I didn’t call.”

Humming, she watches him for a little while, her eyes narrowed; then, finding whatever she’s searching for, or understanding that it isn’t there, she opens her book again and goes back to reading.

Fair enough. Harvey tries to look abashed as he trots up the stairs to Mike’s room; the door is open a crack.

Everything is exactly as he expects, exactly as it was the last time he was here a few days ago, or weeks (it’s hard to remember when the visits are all the same). Except—

On the desk, right in the middle: A note.

How long has it been?

Who can remember.

_Harvey, I really fucked up._

(Remember when?)

_Except I don’t know what I could’ve done differently. Obviously I could’ve not sold the test, but it’s too late for that, but there must have been something I could’ve done at some point between then and now, some thing at some time or I don’t know I want to say I don’t know I feel like I don’t know I something.  
_

_None of this is your fault and I shouldn’t be dumping this all on you but remember how we used to do when we were kids? Even when I had Grammy and Trevor sometimes it felt like all I really had was you. I guess I miss things being simpler like that. Not to get all nostalgic on you because I know they didn’t all feel like good times but you know what I mean?_

_Do you know what I mean?_

_Jesus Harvey I really fucked up._

Harvey never expected an apology; anyway, this is better.

Well. Mostly worse.

Spread underneath the letter is a mess of annotated computer printouts and highlighted flyers about assisted living facilities—some self-described “nursing homes,” so that’s okay then—and loose-leaf scribbled with calculations and block-print numbers next to dollar signs, names of loans and grants struck through or effusively circled. The flyers are covered with the names of diseases and conditions and medications, words like “chronic non-fatal” and “separate Alzheimer’s facility” and “thiazide diuretic,” some circled and others crossed out; Harvey’s embarrassed that he had no idea things had gotten so serious (even though now that he knows, nothing is going to change).

Mike’s cell phone vibrates in Harvey’s pocket; the call is from someone Mike has titled “Boss man.” Harvey thumbs the call button and raises the phone to his ear.

“Yes sir.”

“Chrissake, Ross, are you high?”

Harvey frowns at the guy’s snide tone.

“No,” he says tightly; well, this isn’t the law firm. Even if he were to answer in the affirmative, smoking on the job probably isn’t grounds for much of a censure, to say nothing of termination (assuming this company even has any disciplinary policies at all). “What do you need?”

“I need you to get your ass back to the office ten minutes ago,” Mike’s boss snaps. “There’s about fifteen pounds of paperwork and video tapes here needs to get to some production studio in midtown, if you think you can handle it.”

Something about the way the guy says “handle it” makes it obvious that he thinks Mike can’t, makes it sound like he’s daring him to take the job, like he knows how much Mike needs it, needs the money. Mike deserves better than this shit; he’s probably ten times as hardworking as this dick, and Harvey has half a mind to tell him about it, too, to spend the day finding Mike a better job, one where he can make some use of his otherworldly memory and quick wit instead of just his wiry build and endless determination.

Then his gaze catches on the Assisted Living Facility Study Guide Mike’s assembling for himself, and the disparaging letter he’s not completely convinced Mike meant him to see; the broken screen in the window above the desk, the chipped paint along the doorframe and the frayed carpet in the hall.

This is Mike’s life, and he’s doing the best that he can.

Harvey picks up a bike helmet off the floor and puts it on his head.

“On my way.”

\---

Waking up in his own bed is somehow even more disorienting than waking up in Harvey’s; he should be at Trevor’s place, coming to on a flimsy mattress on the floor with a sore spine and a bruise on his shin from throwing his leg against the hardwood in the middle of the night.

Mike curls over on his side and blinks his eyes about halfway open. The room is in more or less the same state that he left it; his bike helmet should be on the floor, under the desk chair instead of hung on the back, and the papers on the desk shouldn’t be in piles like that, should be scattered in an order he tells himself he understands, but everything else seems the same. Harvey must’ve moved the helmet, must’ve put the papers in an arrangement that actually makes sense.

The papers on his desk.

Mike was high the night before the last switch.

Oh no.

Rolling over onto his back, Mike presses his hands to his eyes; of all the ways he could’ve started talking to Harvey, really talking to him after all this time, it couldn’t have been with something dignified? Maybe an apology for being such an ass for all of the past _three years?_

And Harvey probably _wrote him back,_ Harvey probably responded to a letter he _wasn’t even supposed to read._

Mike clenches his hands in his hair and squeezes his eyes shut. Alright, alright, alright; the best thing to do is just to get it over with.

The piles are arranged pretty nicely, actually, the pamphlets stacked in order of affordability, which is insightful, and the printouts apparently by how much Mike had written in the margins, which is a good measure of how much value Mike has put on them. The calculations aren’t in any discernable order, but that’s okay, seeing as the math isn’t labeled and Mike really just did it on whatever page was closest when he needed to figure something out.

The piles are arranged pretty nicely, and there’s no letter. No note.

Nothing.

Oh.

Good. That’s…good.

Sitting slowly in his old desk chair, Mike folds his hands on the desktop and looks at the piles. Harvey must know what’s going on if he bothered with all this organization; what must he have thought when he saw all this? What must he be thinking now? Fuck, how is Mike supposed to be productive with this on his mind all day?

Come on now, it’s not that hard.

Harvey was just trying to help.

It _is_ helpful, is the thing; everything Harvey’s ever done under the guise of trying to help has pushed him in the right direction. Mike is the one who’s been taking all the wrong turns.

_Try harder._

Mike clenches his fists in the hem of his t-shirt.

_I am._

Oh yeah? Not hard enough. Do better.

Mike nods to himself.

_I will._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thiazide diuretics are a category of medication often used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure).


	16. zero

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter alternates between 1997 (Harvey) and 2007 (Mike).

Life is a funny sort of thing, all in all. After a certain point, it becomes pretty repetitive, on the balance, for most people; get up, eat breakfast (maybe, if circumstances allow), go to work (which of course is for most people just a series of variants on a theme, if it isn’t literally performing the same exact tasks ad nauseam), eat lunch (maybe, if circumstances allow), go home, maybe out with friends to dinner where everyone can bitch and moan about their shitty coworkers and their shitty bosses and their shitty jobs and their shitty husbands and their shitty wives and all the shitty choices they’ve made to get them to this point where they wake up every morning waiting for their shitty day to end while they rhapsodize about all the lifelong dreams they’ll be able to fulfill when they can finally retire only X more years down the line.

Life is a funny sort of thing that way, but it’s not actually funny at all, so what’s the point of anything, really? “Do what makes you happy,” that’s the wisdom every accomplished motherfucker likes to pass along to the little people, “follow your bliss and you’ll find success,” as though that’s the purpose of everything, just to be happy, but doesn’t that open up a whole boxful of troubles? What about those bastards whose happiness hinges on the torture of others, the destruction of the status quo?

Fuck—paper cut. Harvey winces and sticks his finger in his mouth.

These long shifts are pretty dangerous to his peace of mind.

Things really aren’t so bad, anyway; the job is boring and the pay isn’t great, but it’s something, and considering a particularly well-trained dog could probably do it, he should consider himself lucky he’s got it at all. Anyway, it gives him time to think, and when he gets to run upstairs with vacuum-sealed “Immediate action required” envelopes tucked under his arm, strutting down the halls past everyone in their bespoke Tom Ford suits and silk Gucci ties, he gets to feel like a Somebody, or at least like he might have a chance to be one, someday. Who knows, right?

Life could definitely be a lot worse.

He could be a bike messenger.

His stomach turns as it always does when he remembers how unfair the arbitrary universe has been to Mike, wondering for the millionth time (but definitely not the last) what he could have done differently, what he should have done to help out more. Mostly he just wants to know, “Why him,” but the answer is alternately “Who else?” and “Oh, no reason,” which make him sick in different ways, so he tries not to dwell on it.

Harvey picks up a stack of mailings and barely glances down at the recipients’ zip codes as he tosses them in this box or that; the in-state, the out-of-state, the letters, the packages. The ones that require additional postage, the ones that need to be insured; the ones he needs to hand off to a courier, the ones he needs to send back upstairs because some overworked associate or underpaid receptionist left a city or a state out of the address.

Groping for more mail, he finds that he’s sorted it all without noticing. Time to move onto the internal, which is, if anything, even more mindless than the outgoing.

These will be dumped in the associates’ bullpen, those handed off to the senior associates’ wing; these are for delivery to the junior partners, those passed to the senior partners’ secretaries.

Three fifteen. Good lord, nearly two more hours.

Bullpen… Bullpen… Junior Partner… Bullpen… Senior Partner… Senior Associate—

Wait a second.

Rubbing his knuckles across his eyes, Harvey frowns down at the file in his hand. Today’s not the twenty-first. Did he miss this one…three days ago? No, no way; one day, _maybe,_ but he’d never be so careless on a Friday, definitely not.

Backdated. The file was backdated on purpose.

Someone’s gonna be in a lot of trouble.

Shit, it’s probably gonna be him; none of the lawyers will believe that a lowly peon didn’t drag his heels in the mail room when the alternative would be to blame one of their own for committing an actual legal offense. It’s not going to get anyone disbarred, but it might get them fired, and could definitely land the firm in hot water if the DA’s office got wind of it and started checking into this associate’s other potential misdeeds. So what’s he supposed to do? Blame another mail room worker, which is just shitty, or take it upstairs to the top dogs and start making threats. That’s a risky move, to be sure, but if he presents it under the guise of looking out for everyone’s best interests, keeping GSVD’s reputation pristine, then maybe, just maybe…

Alright. This is the most interesting thing to have happened to him since he started working here; actually, aside from being hired, it’s the _only_ interesting thing that’s happened to him since he started working here, and he’s going to handle it right. The name partners probably won’t feel threatened; he needs to go to someone with aspiration, someone who still has room to climb the ladder. But he also needs someone with pull, someone who can handle the matter internally, who can fire the offending associate if it comes to that. A senior partner, then, it has to be. There are eleven of them, though, and as far as Harvey knows, they’re more or less interchangeable; which one is his best bet?

Wait, wait a second; there’s one senior partner who stands out, one who he remembers specifically: Jessica Pearson, the only woman. It’s a shitty way to make his choice, but practically, she’s probably got the toughest fight ahead of her if she wants to move to a managing partnership position, and really, what senior partner _doesn’t_ aspire to that? He won’t bring it up if she doesn’t; she’ll probably know why he’s going to her, but maybe they can keep it under the rug, hopefully by silent agreement.

Backdating is a time-sensitive issue, though, and if he’s going to go through with this, he has to do it now.

Just for a change of pace.

This’ll be fun.

\---

Scooping up all the visible peppers on his falafel sandwich, Mike dumps them in the tinfoil cradling Trevor’s mostly identical lunch and takes Trevor’s pickled radish slices in return, shifting his weight slightly off of his bicycle as he pops one of the radishes in his mouth.

“Oh, yeah,” he says as though he hasn’t been waiting for the opportunity to bring this up, “that girl Nikki called me.”

“Oh, that’s awesome,” Trevor replies, concentrating excessively on the food in his hand. Arching his brow, Mike tries to catch Trevor’s eye.

“I don’t even know how she got my number,” he says. “It’s weird.”

“I do,” Trevor retorts, making a point of looking over Mike’s head instead of anywhere in the vicinity of his face. “I asked her out. She wanted your number instead.”

Knew it. Mike glares as though he’s offended, even though this is pretty textbook for the two of them.

“I didn’t tell her about the Curious George thing,” Trevor assures him, as though Mike is being ridiculous. “What?”

Mike shrugs. “I don’t know,” he muses, “it’s just I felt like I kind of hit it off more with that Jenny girl, that’s all.”

It’s nice, pretending that everything can continue on like this. Like his bike messenger salary will carry Grammy’s medical bills for the rest of her life, like Trevor’s computer business will blossom into a hugely profitable cornerstone of the market if he just has a little more time to get his foot in a few more doors. Like picking up nice girls in halfway decent bars is their biggest concern, their biggest gamble.

Trevor just scoffs. “The blonde?” he dismisses. “She’s not even as hot.”

“I liked her better.”

Mike eats a tomato wedge and Trevor shakes his head.

“Well, you can’t do anything now,” he says. “Girls have rules about that kind of shit.”

It takes a moment for the implication of Trevor’s words to sink in, but when they do, Mike has to work to contain an incredulous laugh. “Are you— Is this a snake?” he accuses. “Are you snaking my girl right now?”

“Oh,” Trevor taunts, smirking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, “I already did.”

“You called her?”

“Of course I did.”

Of course he did. Mike does chuckle under his breath at that, shaking his head and looking out into the street; the girls were fun, both of them, but that was in a barroom setting where everyone puts their favorite persona forward. He wasn’t lying when he claimed to prefer Jenny over her friend, but they didn’t have some kind of instant spark, some mystical connection for him to wax poetic over. They’ve been here before, him and Trevor; it’s fine. It’ll all be fine.

“What a dick,” he says with a smirk. “Son of a bitch.”

“What?” Trevor defends. “I don’t have rules against that shit.”

They really don’t. Mike shakes his head again.

“Okay,” he grumbles. “Ah, whatever. That Nikki girl’s pretty hot, too.”

“Yeah,” Trevor agrees as though he’s just won a debate that means anything. Mike waves him off as though it doesn’t matter even as he tries to tell himself that it does, that they do. (No, well, he knows better.)

A moment later, out of the corner of his eye, Mike catches one of the generic lawyer-type businessmen striding past them; the dude doesn’t spare them a second glance as he throws his shoulders back, the full manila envelope clutched under his arm just slightly wrinkled, as though he’s somebody on a mission, somebody with a reason to be happy, somebody who’s more than just another cookie-cutter corporate shill.

(Because he is.)

Wait, what?

Mike smirks, throwing his abrupt uncertainty into an overly dismissive slouch, shifting all his weight to his right leg and his sandwich to his left hand.

“Look at this clown,” he mocks, nodding toward the stranger. “He walks like he's got a rod up his ass.”

Laughing, Trevor doesn’t even lower his voice as he offers his judgment: “Nice haircut, guy.”

He wants to, sort of (not really), but Mike can’t quite bring himself to look away from the not-generic (but _why_ ) corporate…guy. “Man,” he says, “if I ever look like that, shoot me.”

(Don’t really.)

But _why?_

\---

_Bep, bep, bep._

Six thirty.

The ceiling is sort of blurry; Harvey blinks a couple of times and the overhead light comes into focus. He should get out of bed or he won’t have time to eat before he has to be at the mailroom.

Does he have to, though?

If Jessica Pearson is to be believed, and he can’t think of any reason that she wouldn’t, he’s going to _Harvard._ Not just Harvard, but Harvard _Law._ He’s going to be a _lawyer._

Holy _shit._

Why didn’t he think of this years ago? He should have, he _did;_ who was the inspiration, who put the idea in little Harvey’s head back in the day? It’s a blank space, a dark spot where the name, the face, the story should be, but it doesn’t matter. The reality of it settled into his brain overnight, taking the time to shift from wild fantasy to solid truth: He’s going to be a _lawyer,_ and it’s _perfect._

Jessica—he should probably call her Ms. Pearson, actually, considering how much he’s about to owe her for turning his life around; she didn’t tell him to stop coming to work, and it’s only February. The fall semester won’t be starting until September, or maybe August, and he should just go about his days as normal until then. If Ms. Pearson plans to use firm funds to put him through law school, she’ll have to make some pretty big withdrawals that she might not want the other partners to question, and he definitely doesn’t want to do anything to accidentally raise suspicions against her.

Of course, to do any of that, he has to actually get out of bed.

It’ll be a good day. He’ll wear his nicest shirt.

In the midst of tying his shoes, Harvey decides to spring for a proper cup of coffee from the cart on the corner in front of GSVD. Maybe a bagel too, if he’s in the mood; he’ll decide on the spot. If he brings his lunch, or skips it (viable if he goes for the bagel), he’ll have more than enough money to spare, he’s pretty sure; there’s a twenty in his wallet, isn’t there?

Harvey grabs his wallet off his desk and peers inside to find no twenty, but a ten and a five, which will still leave him with a few bucks and hey, this is a treat, right, he should just go for it. Feeling across the desk for his keys as he endeavors to unzip his backpack one-handed, he finds instead a stray sheet of paper he doesn’t remember leaving there last night, glancing down to find what looks to be some kind of letter. Did he write that? But…when? And who does he have to write _to?_

_Hey Mike, I swear to god I’m not saying this to brag; this is just the best way I can think of to make sure you hear it from me: The firm where I work is sending me to Harvard Law._

The passage is familiar, though a dark spot lurks in his memory in place of having written it, too hazy to grasp concretely, or even in pieces.

_I didn’t ask them to, and it wasn’t my idea. I was sorting the mail when I found a file from an associate that had been backdated, and I promise I was just trying to get a promotion or maybe a little raise, I don’t know, mostly I wanted to save my own ass so they wouldn’t blame me for not sorting the file on time, so I took it to one of the senior partners, Jessica Pearson, and she said “I’m impressed, Mister Specter, where did you say you were from,” and I was like “Boston,” and she kind of laughed and said “I meant where did you go to school,” and I said NYU and she was like “I have a feeling that you have a great potential to make me a lot of money,” and then suddenly I’m going to Harvard to get my JD?  
_

_Mike, I’m so sorry. And I know it won’t be the same at all but maybe it’ll be kind of nice, you getting to go to some classes and see all my notes and everything. I’m not asking you to be happy for me, just please don’t hate me. If I could trade places with you, I would, you know that, right?_

_~~I’m proud of you for everything you’re doing.~~ _ _You’re a much better person than I am._

Setting the letter back down, Harvey sits carefully and loses focus looking out the window.

This sounds important. It sounds so, so important.

But who the fuck is Mike?

\---

Shoving the few shirts he keeps on actual hangers off to the side, Mike sticks his hand into every bag, every jacket pocket he can find in the back of the closet; there’s got to be some money somewhere in here, even just a few bucks he could take to the casino to multiply in a poker game or two. He can put off paying his rent for another week at most, at least until he gets his next paycheck, but if he keeps cutting it close like this, he’ll lose all the benefit of the doubt he stockpiled last year helping the landlord’s kid pass Algebra II.

Money, money, money, there must be some in here _somewhere…_

Underneath a fraying corduroy jacket, he discovers an old box that he can't remember the contents of. Gold, if he’s lucky, but honestly he’d settle for fifty bucks. Even twenty would be good, he’s not too picky.

There’s no money, but there is a faded notebook (once navy blue, now a stormy sort of grey) that he doesn’t recognize.

The first two pages are blank.

 _Hi Michael,_ the top of the third reads in what he’s willing to bet is a child’s hand. _I heard about your parents. I’m really sorry._

What the fuck?

 _Thanks, I guess,_ he reads a few lines down. _You didn’t know them so this is weird._

It’s a few years immature, but that’s definitely his handwriting. Trying not to panic, Mike flips forward a few pages, only catching a few words here and there before the writing vanishes so fast he isn’t sure he didn’t hallucinate it to begin with. A Post-It with the words “GO TO THE GYM” is stuck in at a seemingly random interval, an ordinance he definitely didn’t follow and doesn’t remember receiving; the rest of the pages are entirely blank, and when he turns back to the beginning, the words there have disappeared, too.

A few loose papers remain at the bottom of the box, in varying stages of yellowness and wear. One has a small water stain, another ripped apart and taped back together, but none have any writing, and Mike can’t imagine why in the world he’s been hanging onto them.

It’s not important; right now, he needs to get his hands on some petty cash.

He’ll clean the closet out later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 21 February, 1997 was a Friday; the associate Harvey caught sent in his file on Monday, 24 February, and pretended to have done it the previous week because he’s a lazy ass, I assume. (Those dates are noncanonical; the event itself is from canon, but it doesn’t have any specifics attached to it.)
> 
> Mike and Trevor’s conversation is lifted [verbatim](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s02e08) out of “Rewind” (s02e08), the flashback section of which takes place in 2007. (Harvey is [canonically the guy with a rod up his ass who walks past Mike and Trevor](http://screencapped.net/tv/suits/albums/uploads/Season%2002/208%20Rewind/Suits208_1122.jpg), I didn’t just throw that in for my own convenience.)


	17. phone call

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In order, this chapter takes place in: 1997 (Harvey), 2008 (Mike), 2000 (Harvey), 2009 (Mike), 2003 (Harvey), 2011 (Mike).

In the chill of dusk, the ionic columns barricading its façade sharply outlined by the contrast of early November darkness outside and yellow incandescent lights flooding the newly-renovated galleries within, Langdell Hall stands tall, an imposing creature waiting to eat students alive, to consume their lives, the infinite veins and twitching muscles of its living self tempting them to try forever and ever even though they’ll never be able to learn a measurable fraction of all that it contains (not that a truth so simple could ever stop those who make it a habit to bury themselves in the stacks until midnight every night they can manage, but only nine o’clock on Saturdays). The evening rush is over, the last of those students desperate to finish the papers suddenly due tomorrow that somehow slipped through the cracks while they attempted to balance an academic life with a social one all gone off to accept their fates, but the loyal few remain, those who not only came to Harvard Law convinced that they knew their true purpose in life but were lucky enough to find that they were right.

Under a tree across from the library doors, Harvey sits, spinning a pen between his fingers and watching his peers rush about like startled animals as he mentally sorts between those bundled up in triple layers (west coast), those sporting half-zipped jackets (middle America), and the few daring to get away with only a sweatshirt (east coast).

He ought to be in there. Ought to be working on a paper, preparing for a test. Looking up some laundry list of lesser-known facts about the inner workings of corporate culture to wow Professor Gunn, or ethical mores from other countries to take into battle against Professor Gerard. Doing something to make himself stand out of the crowd, to prove that Jessica made a good decision in sending him here.

He’s not, though.

He’d like to, or he’d like to like to, but it’s…difficult. Hasn’t he wanted to be a lawyer since forever? It’s hard to remember, he isn’t sure anymore; maybe he’s one of these guys who thought he was following his dreams until he actually got to Harvard and found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, or maybe he’s just remembering things wrong, but neither feels quite like the truth. It’s not that being here is _bad,_ and he’s not having a hard time with his studies or anything; it’s just that he’s searching for something _else,_ something he’s been searching for since forever even though he doesn’t know how to look or quite what he’s looking _for._

Sticking the pen into an outside pocket of his backpack, Harvey pushes himself off the ground and walks toward the library. Fuck it; when was the last time he did something just because he wanted to? The important thing isn’t to be happy, it’s to do what he has to do, to come out on top of whatever hill he finds himself climbing, vaulting over every obstacle thrown in his way. He might not particularly want to be here, but he’ll be damned if anybody accuses him of not being good enough to cut it.

A girl strides past him then, appearing out of nowhere with her blue dress fluttering around her knees and a book or four clutched in her arms, the bulging shape of her backpack making it obvious that it’s packed full of even more. She knows where she’s going, why she’s here (damn her); glancing over her shoulder, she smirks right at him, her pretty face full of confidence and pride. When the smugness falls away, Harvey sort of recognizes her; they have Constitutional Law together, he thinks. Yeah, she’s one of Dyson’s favorites, he calls on her all the time. She’s quick on her feet, too; one of the smart ones. Her name is Smith or Stone or something; Scott, that’s it. Miss Scott.

Maybe that’s what Harvey’s been looking for, he ponders as she pulls open the door and doesn’t bother to hold it for him. Someone to challenge him, someone to learn from, to grow with. Someone to confide in, to commiserate with. Someone who understands.

It’s an awfully big onus to put on some sassy girl he doesn’t even know. He doesn’t really expect her to be able to fulfill it.

If he doesn’t tell her anything, maybe it’ll be okay that she’s just a stand-in.

\---

Grammy fixes Mike with an icy stare, her disapproval bizarrely heightened somehow by her lilting posture as she directs her comments to the floral embroidered pillows on the couch beside him. He tries to maintain a neutral expression, but she doesn’t seem to be buying it.

“This will not make up for putting your whole life into a tailspin,” she says, and Mike knew this wouldn’t be easy but he told himself that she would understand, that he would be able to convince her. He told himself he could do it, that he wouldn’t be tempted to give up. For some reason, that it would be easy.

“It’s a head start,” he defends.

“No,” she scolds, her fiery tone a mismatch to her immobile slouch. “It’s not a head start. That boy is going to drag you back down with him.”

Mike doesn’t quite know how to explain without sounding bitterly resentful that even with the fee-for-services model, even with the little bit that Medicare covers, even with Grammy’s social security, the nursing home (“assisted living facility”) is damn expensive, and those fees really pile up; that even at its cheapest, filling a single prescription of market-price Diovan HCT costs over a hundred dollars, that all those doctor’s visits are draining her retirement fund and his already spare bank account, that Trevor paying a year’s rent for him to live in the city isn’t just a head start, it’s a godsend.

“Grammy, I’m never going to let that happen,” he says tersely.

“Goddamn it, I forbid it!” she snaps, and Mike wants to argue, but his words seem to have left him; he knows better, anyway.

Eventually, she sighs, closing her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry, Michael,” she says. “I lost my temper.”

He wants to accept her apology, but she doesn’t give him a chance: “But I, I know what he does to you,” she goes on, “and I know he’ll always be the same.”

It’s a fear Mike has increasingly harbored over the years, but it’s not like he’s had a whole lot of stability in his life so far, and Trevor has always been there, the only one who’s been unflinchingly supportive from the very beginning through every goddamn thing the universe has thrown his way.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m not the same?” he bites back, and she doesn’t believe it but she wants to, he sees it in her eyes.

“What’s changed?”

“I met someone,” he says (leaving out the part where he gave Claire the impression that he’s a student at Columbia Law). “I’m going to figure out a way to finish school, and then, I’m going to go to law school.”

That’s always been the plan. That’ll always be the plan, and he won’t stop fighting until he makes it happen.

Grammy nods slowly. “Good,” she says. “Then do it from here.”

Mike thinks about setting all his hopes on Claire’s shoulders, about how he knows their relationship can’t bear the weight of his lie for long but it’ll be so much _easier_ living on his own, living somewhere away from all his childhood memorabilia, from all the reminders of the past he suffered through as bravely as he knew how.

He’s going to get his shit together and make a life for himself. A real one that’s all his, unmarred by tragedy. Maybe, hopefully, somewhere along the way, he’ll find what he’s been missing.

Whatever that is.

\---

In retrospect, Harvey should have known that Jessica wouldn’t accept him into the firm right away, immediately after graduation; she has a reputation to maintain, after all, and an image to project. Can’t make the favoritism too obvious.

Anyway, working in the DA’s office is more fun than going to law school was. Dealing with real defense attorneys instead of snobby professors looking for any excuse to give him an F, real defendants instead of overeager peers champing at the bit to prove their superiority by hook or by crook. Cameron Dennis is a great attorney and a great mentor; Harvey’s professors spent all their time preparing him for court but none of them ever _really_ advised against going there in the first place, and Dennis’s motto—“It’s not about caring, it’s about winning,” as the saying goes—is refreshingly in line with Harvey’s own philosophy, even if Dennis has no trouble sometimes going about winning in ways Harvey has to ignore in order to sleep at night. Caring only opens him up to betrayal, anyway; Scottie understood. It was nice to be able to keep things casual with her, the push-and-pull of their relationship enough to make things interesting without having to worry about being pinned down.

She couldn’t quite give him whatever he’s been hunting for, but they satisfied each other for the time that they needed satisfying.

Harvey toys with the drink in his hand and looks indifferently at his reflection in the mirror over the bar. He won't be going back to Jessica with a perfect record; seven whole months shot down the drain by one goddamn defendant refusing to let his lawyer settle. It’s not as though Harvey didn’t offer him a fair deal, either; the fucker’s not going to prison or anything, but he’s lost about half his considerable fortune in sentencing, plus his lawyer’s doubtlessly sizeable fee and the massive hit his reputation will take from the trial which will surely be exaggerated by the prosecuting party.

“You know,” a feminine voice intones out of nowhere, “usually when someone wins their first trial, they at least pretend to finish the drink their fellow ADAs bought them.”

Harvey frowns at the intrusion, wondering if someone’s trying to prank him. “I’m sorry,” he says, turning to the bright-eyed redhead at his side, “do we—”

“Know each other?” the woman interrupts confidently. “Not yet. But today’s your lucky day.”

She knows about his trial, so assuming this _isn’t_ some kind of massively delayed initiation joke, she’s done her homework on him, and she doesn’t exactly strike Harvey as the stalker type; a tremendous opportunist, maybe, but Harvey can respect someone who knows the moment to take advantage of a situation. Maybe they can help each other out.

“And why is that?” he goads with a faint grin that she returns with a poor effort to clamp down on her own wide smile.

“Because it’s the day you get to meet Donna.”

Almost definitely not a prank.

“And let me guess,” he says, “you’re Donna.”

“Oh, you have no idea how Donna I am.”

Maybe that Linguistics degree was good for something after all. Harvey immediately recognizes her aggressive manner, her laudatory choice of words designed to make him wonder how he ever got along without her; she’s not subtle, he’ll give her that. Someone so transparent won’t be able to keep pace with him, won’t give him a run for his money, but she’s got drive, she’s hungry, eager to show off what a hard worker she is; maybe she wants a job. This is an unconventional way to go about getting it, definitely, but maybe he could use somebody so…innovative.

The hollowness inside of him still isn’t going away, but Donna might be able to help balm the wound a little.

\---

It was carelessness that got him caught.

Carelessness and arrogance.

Mike picks at his shirtsleeves, pulling the hem out of the waistband of his jeans and rolling his shoulders back. He should’ve thrown a few hands, that would’ve fooled them; just because his brain automatically counts the cards doesn’t mean he needs to win every time. No sane dealer is gonna believe a fifteen-round hot streak, he should’ve known better. He _did_ know better, it’s just that…

Well. Careless.

He’s starting to run out of casinos.

More to the point, he’s starting to run out of options.

Grammy’s nursing home is paid off for the time being and her prescriptions have all been recently filled, but thanks to Citibank’s minimum balance fee (automatically withdrawn without advance notification, as written in the policy manual, sir, we can’t be liable if you didn’t bother to read the information we provided you), as of yesterday his account literally has negative money in it. He isn’t worried so much about food; picking over Trevor’s abandoned leftovers is enough to sustain him, even if it doesn’t lead to the most balanced diet, but his year’s almost up and Trevor is going to start charging rent soon. He can probably get away without any spending for the rest of the week, until he gets his next paycheck, but he’s going to have to start picking up more shifts if he wants to have any chance of keeping up with the bills. All the bills. God, there are so many bills.

Everything is just maintenance now. The bare minimum to ensure survival, although he’s lost the idea of an end game; somewhere along the way, law school transformed from a realistic goal into a nostalgic piece of trivia, “When I was a kid I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up.” (When you did _what?_ )

If Mike could find the thing to fill the emptiness inside of him, whatever it is he’s been missing all these years, maybe then… It’s a stupid thought, of course, fanciful and pointless, but at moments like this, walking through the blooming darkness away from the bright lights of Atlantic City and back to the bus station with no one around to judge, no one around to point out that it’s ridiculous to pretend even just to himself that there’s a single anything that could solve all his problems, he might as well think it.

In the morning, he’ll be rational. In the morning, he’ll admit that he has to come up with a solution that makes sense, a solution that at least _sounds_ plausible, that he wouldn’t be ashamed to describe to other people.

In the dead of night, running out of leeway and running out of time, powering himself forward by sheer force of will, hoping against hope that somehow things will all work out, that someone will come along and save him, he chooses to pretend, just for now, that his fantasies have a shot at making sense.

Anything is possible.

Sure it is.

\---

Caring only opens him up to betrayal. This is fact, this he knows.

He doesn’t care. He never did. The DA’s office didn’t _mean_ anything to him, it was just a place to get some experience before he went back to the firm; Cameron Dennis wasn’t some kind of idol, he was just Harvey’s boss before he went back to Jessica. He worked there for awhile and now he’s quit because that’s what people do with jobs they’ve gotten bored of, places they’d prefer to leave behind. They quit and they find something else, something better.

He’s moving on.

It’s fine.

At his new desk, a pretty highly-polished oak number with sharp edges, in his cubicle, positioned at the corner closest to the hallway where the senior associates have their offices so he can feel like a big shot, in the associates’ bullpen, empty after his coworkers have finally gone home for the day, Harvey wakes up his computer and logs onto Pearson Hardman’s website.

It’s a nice website; mostly greyscale, though the grey seems somehow more silver and Jessica’s and Daniel Hardman’s photographs are brightly colored.

PEOPLE, reads the tab between SERVICES and CAREERS. They don’t name mail room workers under those tabs; Harvey knows. He’s checked.

Associates are listed alphabetically, at the bottom of the page.

Harvey hasn’t submitted a bio to IT yet, but it’s not surprising that his credentials are already posted. Jessica probably had a hand in that; well, it’s understandable. She’d be eager to show off her latest acquisition.

_Previous Experience: New York County District Attorney’s Office, Assistant District Attorney_

Harvey’s stomach turns.

“Instead of thinking about what I want to be doing in ten years, I started thinking about who I want to be doing it with.”

It was the truth when the idea first came to him, and it was the truth when he said it to Jessica last Thursday.

“Me over him,” she’d replied without a clear sense of how exactly right she was.

Picking up the phone, Harvey taps his fingers against the buttons and wonders if it’s possible to erase that part of his past. But is it really erased if it’s just a kept secret? Is it really a secret if Jessica knows, if it’s freely available to anyone who bothers to check out the public record? Even if it is a secret, what good does it do to pretend it didn’t happen? Hasn’t he already cut away enough of his history, thrown out the nasty pieces that have nevertheless helped shape him into the man he is?

Of course, if he isn’t willing to discard the parts of himself he’s outgrown, the parts he’s risen above, he’ll never become the man he aspires to be. A winner; a real one.

Real winners know how to play the game. Real winners know what they have to do to get to the center of the board.

Harvey sighs.

“Hello, IT? This is Harvey Specter at Pearson Hardman; I have a question about the website.”

\---

“Your grandmother’s getting worse.”

No, but, things have to get worse before they can get better.

Oh do they? Do they really?

What a stupid saying. Especially when it’s usually prefaced by a big fat “If,” as in “ _If_ things are going to get better,” and seriously how often does _that_ happen?

Maybe, though. Maybe this time, maybe just this once.

“Trevor, I’m in.”

_Just this once._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Langdell Hall (the Harvard Law School building which contains the library, open until midnight six days a week and nine o’clock on Saturdays) underwent a 15-month [renovation](http://hls.harvard.edu/library/about-the-library/history-of-the-harvard-law-school-library/renovation-of-langdell-hall/) from June 1996 to the beginning of September 1997.
> 
> [Temperatures](https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBOS/1997/11/19/MonthlyHistory.html?req_city=&req_state=&req_statename=&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=) in Cambridge, Massachusetts in November 1997 fell between 21°F (-6°C) and 64°F (18°C).
> 
> The circumstances of Harvey’s first encounter with Scottie are lifted from their conversation in “[The Arrangement](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s03e01)” (s03e01), but given that at the time of the conversation, Harvey is trying to tell Scottie that he’s cared for her since the first moment he saw her, the emotional context is obviously quite different.
> 
> Mike’s and Edith’s conversation is lifted verbatim from “[Fork in the Road](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s04e13)” (s04e13).
> 
> Cameron Dennis’s teachings (“Never go to court” and “It’s not about caring. It’s about winning”) and his evidence suppression habit, as well as the fact that Harvey’s bio at Pearson Hardman doesn’t mention his time at the DA’s office, are referenced in “[Rules of the Game](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e11)” (s01e11).
> 
> Harvey and Donna’s conversation is lifted verbatim from “[Not Just a Pretty Face](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s04e16)” (s04e16).
> 
> Diovan HCT is a combination angiotensin II receptor antagonist and diuretic used to treat isolated systolic hypertension (tl;dr it’s medication used to treat high blood pressure).
> 
> Mike being broke and getting kicked out of a casino in Atlantic City for card counting is referenced in “[All In](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s02e06)” (s02e06).
> 
> Harvey’s and Jessica’s dialogue is lifted verbatim from “[The Other Time](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s03e06)” (s03e06).
> 
> "Your grandmother's getting worse" and "Trevor, I'm in" are lifted verbatim from "[Pilot](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)" (s01e01).


	18. face to face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Second](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/161083915484/in-honor-of-being-almost-finished-with-kings-of) mood board!

Twenty-five thousand dollars.

Mike isn’t the type to believe in fate or any of that bullshit—it would be too depressing to think that all the crap he’s had to deal with was, like, “predestined”—but if anything ever was, this might be it.

Really, though, it’s just good timing.

The suit he picked up for eighty bucks, on sale at an outlet store downtown, won’t fool anyone with an eye for good tailoring, but if he keeps his head up and his step light, he should be able to get through even a snooty hotel like the Chilton without drawing too much attention. Carrying a briefcase will make him all the more unremarkable; no one will be able to tell just by looking that it’s full of pot instead of paperwork.

And at the end of the night, he’ll have twenty-five thousand dollars, and Grammy won’t have to move to a state facility, and he’ll be able to keep scraping by, and maybe someday something better will come along, but until then, everything will be fine.

In the bathroom, Mike splashes some water on his face and blinks at himself in the mirror. This is going to work. It is. Everything will be fine.

Walking jerkily into what passes for a living room in his and Trevor’s shitty loft apartment, he tightens his tie against his throat.

It’ll be fine.

\---

When Harvey arrives at Room 2005, Donna has already set herself up at a desk in front of the study's door, holding a pen close to her mouth and offering him an incredulous glance. It doesn’t take him a moment to figure out why; two prospective associates are already seated on the bench across the hall from her, one with his hands folded primly in his lap and the other skimming some file so frantically that Harvey is hard pressed to believe he’s absorbing any of it.

Disgusting, the both of them.

Harvey and Donna roll their eyes in commiseration, and the uptight wannabe’s leg twitches. Smirking to himself, Harvey strides confidently into the study, surveying the two identical comfortable-looking sofas, the snobby Victorian curtains hung over the floor-to-ceiling windows, the rust-red armchair in the corner. It’s obvious why Jessica stages all the senior partners’ associate interviews here; it’s close enough to a museum exhibit to remind the kids that they’re playing in the big leagues and need to watch their step, but soft enough that anyone who legitimately has their head on straight has a theater in which demonstrate how much they belong there.

Sitting in a padded black desk chair in front of the fireplace, Harvey puts his laptop down and braces his elbows on the glossy black table before him, scrutinizing the two stiff wooden chairs ( _you are less than I_ ) opposite, and folds his hands in front of his mouth. This is an exercise in futility, the whole goddamn thing. He doesn’t need his own associate; he’s more than capable of holding his own in the office, and any busywork that has to be done, anything he can trust to _anyone_ else can be handed off to one of the cardboard cutouts in Louis’s bullpen. Training some lackey until he’s up to a suitable standard for a real assignment will take time Harvey doesn’t have to spare; he could be working, he _should_ be working, but instead he’ll waste the day trying to figure out who’s the least annoying warm body to emerge from Harvard’s graduating class of 2011, and so far the odds aren’t in his favor that any of them will fit the bill.

At nine o’clock on the dot, the first kid walks in, the uptight one now with his hands swinging at his sides at the most measured pace Harvey’s ever seen. Inviting him to sit in the righthand stiff wooden chair, the one closer to the door, Harvey looks to Donna for her recommendation—widened eyes and stretched lips, an obvious “yikes”—and nods his thanks for her confirmation of his suspicions.

Including the one who still hasn’t stopped “reading” his file, there are now two boys and one girl lined up against the wall awaiting their turn in the dragon’s den.

Harvey wonders how much time he has to jerk this guy around before he puts himself behind schedule.

\---

Mike’s cop-averse instincts tell him to take the stairs to Room 2412 for the drop, but the elevator will be way less conspicuous, and it’s not like the pot is especially noticeable; Trevor’s supplier this time is a real high-end guy, or the client is, because the product is crammed into nine smell-proof baggies, each filled to the brim. It’s fine, he’s fine. Everything is fine. The buyer will be waiting with an identical briefcase full of cash, and all Mike has to do is make the exchange and get the hell out of there, easy breezy.

In the bathroom, Mike splashes some water on his face and blinks at himself in the mirror.

“You can do this,” he mutters. Yeah he can. Who knows, maybe this’ll even be the thing that finally fills in all the gaps.

Hey, it could happen.

\---

Jesus fucking Christ, it’s only ten o’clock.

His innate professionalism is solely responsible for keeping Harvey from shoving the latest pathetic interviewee out the door, the smile on his face long since plasticized. There’s no way he’s going to make it through another six hours of these things.

“Donna,” he says as soon as the kid’s out of his sight, “we're going to need to streamline this.” He looks speculatively at the waiting automatons and quirks a grin. “Give each guy a hard time before you send them back. Give me a wink if they say something clever. Cool?”

Donna grins back. “Okay,” she agrees. “What are you looking for?”

Harvey glances back into the interview room, at the snobby curtains, the glossy table; he’s come a long way since Newton, fighting the good fight. Have any of the Harvard douches in the hall had to work as hard as he did? Overcome the kind of shit he has? Learn the hard way that there’s no excuse not to push until it breaks? (These chances are once-in-a-lifetime and if you fuck this one up, kid, it’s not coming back around.)

Do any of them have the piece that he’s been missing?

Harvey sticks his hands in his pockets.

“Another me.”

Hey. It could happen.

\---

The hall can’t possibly be this long. Mike’s palms are sweating, one clenched into a fist and the other, the one holding the briefcase, sliding against the leather handle as he tries to even out his breaths.

Room 2412. In and out, no big deal.

Beside a sign on the wall pointing to Rooms 2412 – 2420, right before a hallway intersection, a bellboy stands beside an empty luggage cart, fussing with a keycard that seems to have broken as he struggles to open the door to 2410. A dissatisfied-looking man stands behind him, watching the red light on the door lock and making no effort to help, no assurance that everything is fine, let’s just call downstairs to the front desk for another key.

The bellboy tilts his head just slightly, catching Mike out of the corner of his eye.

Goddamn; Mike saw that guy downstairs, pushing a loaded luggage cart. Totally loaded. But if he can’t get into this guy’s room, then what the hell happened to all those bags?

Something’s not right about this.

“Uh, excuse me,” he says as he nears the pair. “I was thinking about going for a swim. Are the pool facilities here nice?”

To his credit, maybe, the bellboy seems flustered, taking a moment to answer. “Of course, sir,” he says with a pretty admirable recovery. “This is the Chilton Hotel.”

Nope. Mike distinctly remembers a sign in the lobby apologizing for the inconveniently closed pool facilities, directing thus inclined Chilton guests around the corner to the Metropolitan Health and Racquet Club on 55th street.

_Don’t let on._

“And, uh, do you have the time?” he asks, trying to sound as indifferent as possible.

The so-called “guest” pushes back the sleeve of his suit jacket to reveal a nice enough watch (although anyone staying in a place like this really ought to be able to afford something better) and, more importantly, a surprisingly unconcealed gun holstered at his belt.

Fuck. Cops. This is a setup.

“It's, uh, ten o’clock.”

Mike nods, his lips thinning in an obligatory little smile. “Thanks,” he says, sidling around the guy’s back and continuing on down the hall. The stairs this time for sure; if the cops are going to follow him, he’ll be a sitting duck in the elevator.

He hears them muttering to each other as he leaves, probably about their currently failing drug bust, maybe about which of them is going to follow him. Shit, Mike’s never going to make it out of the building at this rate, probably not even down to the lobby; what are the odds that he’ll be able to sneak into one of the other rooms? Insanely low, especially if he doesn’t want to risk accosting one of the guests (and he’s not too keen on that idea anyway).

Wait a second, there was another poster board sign downstairs: Pearson Hardman HARVARD LAW INTERVIEWS Room 2005.

Well…he _is_ wearing a suit…

And it’s not like he has a lot of options.

Turning sharply around the corner at the intersection, Mike shoves open the door to the emergency stairwell and runs as fast as he can. _Room 2005, Room 2005, Room 2005._ Fourth floor, third floor, second floor, first; just before the stairwell door swings shut behind him, he hears the faintly echoing scratch of the door upstairs opening again as one of the cops comes after him.

_Room 2005, Room 2005, Room 2005._

A few uptight people in suits form a grim march to the interview room, easy enough for Mike to follow without having to worry about keeping track of which hall he’s bolting down (only having to shove one especially pretentious-looking douchebag out of his way).

“Rick Sorkin,” a woman’s voice calls irately, a redheaded professional secretary-type coming into view as Mike stumbles around the corner. “Rick Sorkin?” she repeats, glaring at him.

Mike gestures at himself reflexively, eyebrows raised. _Who, me?_

“Excuse me, Mister Sorkin,” she goes on, “you are five minutes late. Is there a reason why I should let you in?”

What the fuck is going on here?

“Look,” Mike breathes, glancing back down the hall the way he came, ignoring the dirty glares some of the people lined up there shoot his way. Whatever, it’s not like he’s got an actual interview to blow here; there’s really no reason _not_ to be honest. “I'm just trying to ditch the cops, okay? I don't really care if you let me in or not.”

The woman looks…impressed? She’s definitely trying to decide whether or not to smile.

“Mister Specter will be right with you.”

He narrows his eyes, not entirely convinced he heard her right.

“What?”

“Can I get you anything?” she asks. “A coffee or a bottle of water?”

As he fumbles for a response, she leans back toward the room behind her and winks.

What the _fuck_ is going on here?

Mike looks to the right where the person, probably this Mister Specter, who the woman winked at is concealed from his view; she looks up at Mike goadingly and he edges forward, stepping around to the rather large room behind her.

A fit-looking man in a fine charcoal suit stands with his back to the door, to Mike.

“Hi,” Mike says as Mister Specter puts his left hand in his pocket and makes to extend his right for a shake, a power play in the slow turn of his head.

Suddenly, and without warning.

_Finally._

The ground opens underneath his feet, darkness gently cocooning him as every guidepost, every spot of light vanishes and he’s found it, this is it, the thing that he’s been searching for all this time. He can only imagine how he looks, how startled, how confused, how afraid, how relieved; maybe he looks exactly like Mister Specter, whose face somehow manages to combine all four and maybe a few others as well.

_You, too?_

Harvey wants to speak, wants to bridge the gap, end the silence that’s stretched on between them since the beginning of time, but how? How? Whatever he comes up with, it won’t be right, won’t be enough, won’t remotely capture how long he’s been waiting for exactly this, how very much his entire life has been leading to this precise moment. He wants to move, he _has_ to move, but his feet, his legs are leaden, bolted to the floor and the other man ( _who are you_ ) isn’t moving either, must be feeling the same thing ( _who are you_ ) and…and…

“Who are you?”

( _I asked first._ )

Mike smiles.

“Mike,” he says. “Mike Ross.”

Harvey takes his hand and holds it.

“Harvey Specter.”

There’s so much he wants to know and he has no clue what to ask or how to ask it.

“I missed you.”

What a funny thing to say.

And yet, and yet.

_Yes, I understand._

Harvey drops his grip and gestures to the nearest sofa; only once they’ve both sat down with their knees touching and their hands well within reach of one another does he realize that it didn’t even occur to him to offer the chairs ( _that's not what we’re doing here_ ). Mike is still smiling as though he doesn’t know how to stop.

For a little while longer, they allow themselves to remain frozen in the moment, this moment, giddy and gleeful and liberated from years of the constraints of I Don’t Know What. Then Mike leans away just a bit, his smile fading by degrees into concern as shame closes its fist around his heart, guilt and anger and contempt with a target, a source he can’t name, some darkness in Harvey’s past that he’s long since forgotten and longer since learned to despise. Harvey doesn’t move but his face falls too, the sorrow in his eyes profound and understanding but how could he, how _can_ he (no, he doesn’t) (but he _does_ ).

_I’m so sorry._

“You did everything you could.”

(How can you say that?)

_I tried my very best._

(I know you did, and so did I.)

Mike’s smile is smaller now but no less sincere, maybe even more so since they’ve begun to settle, no longer so overwhelmed by all this is and all they are (whatever it is).

“You ever meet someone, and you just want to tell them everything?” he asks in a tone that makes it sound like he already knows the answer (that the answer is _yes,_ that the answer is _you_ ). “I mean, everything that’s ever happened? Everything you’ve ever done, or wanted to do, or even just thought about doing? I mean, _everything?_ ”

( _Yes._ )

Harvey wants to hear it all.

Mike chuckles.

“I have no idea where to start.”

(At the beginning.)

Harvey shakes his head.

“We’ve got time.”

Do we?

Mike’s gaze darts to the door where the potential associates are still waiting. None of them are more important than…this, this undefinable thing, but he does feel sort of bad making them wait. (Sort of.)

“Forget about them,” Harvey says, standing and walking to the table that has his laptop on it. There’s no contest anymore, and it would be cruel to let anyone else even think they still have a chance (they don’t, they never did, not when Mike is here, and real, and here). “You’ve always wanted to be a lawyer, haven’t you?”

It doesn’t occur to either of them to find the question the least bit strange, an implicit understanding of information Harvey has no way of knowing, and Mike nods. “I wanted to go to Harvard when I was a kid.”

Humming a quiet agreement, Harvey opens the laptop and clicks on the Outlook 2010 icon as he just stops himself from saying “I know” or something else that can’t possibly be true. “That’s a good start,” he decides, trying to figure out how to word an email to Jessica that’ll end his quest for a new associate without too blatantly lying about anything or making him sound like he’s gone off the deep end.

“I memorize the BARBRI handbook and passed the Bar on a bet when I was in college,” Mike offers then, standing to amble over to the stiff wooden chairs. “February of my freshman year, landed in the eighty-fifth percentile.”

Harvey’s fingers pause over the keys as he looks up to meet Mike’s sheepish gaze.

“You’re serious,” he deadpans, and Mike shrugs.

“I had a math test the next day, I think.”

Yes, because the part Harvey has a hard time believing is that Mike didn’t score _higher._

“Alright, that’s it,” he mutters, opening a new message and typing Jessica’s name in the bar for RECIPIENTS. Mike leans just slightly to the right, although there’s no way he can see the screen from the other side of the table.

“What’s it?” he asks. Harvey grins.

“I’m emailing the firm we’ve just found our next associate.”

Mike’s eyes widen and he bites down on his face-splitting smile, though he isn’t sure why; the opportunity Harvey’s offering him is amazing, life-changing, unbelievable, everything he’s ever wanted and not even close to the best or most remarkable thing to happen today, this month, this year. If he wants to smile, he’s got every right.

“And then,” Harvey clicks “Send” and closes the laptop’s lid, “I’m taking the rest of the day that I blocked off for all these meetings that have just been cancelled, and you and I are going to go back to my penthouse.”

“You have a penthouse?” Mike blurts out, quickly superseded by: “We are?”

Standing, Harvey shoves the laptop into his briefcase and grins.

“Well, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Stepping out from behind the chairs, Mike sticks his hands in his pockets and hopes it isn’t too off-puttingly obvious how much he wants to touch Harvey.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “about thirty years’ worth.”

Maybe now everything will have a shot at making sense.

The thing is, though, he thinks as Harvey reaches out for another handshake that doesn’t last long before they’re holding onto each other, fit together as though they’ve come to the end of a long journey, or maybe the beginning of an endless one.

The thing is, it doesn’t really need to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the dialogue beginning with “You can do this” and ending with “Hi,” plus “I’m emailing the firm we’ve just found our next associate,” is lifted verbatim from [Pilot](http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01) (s01e01).
> 
> Harvey and Mike are not communicating telepathically; they just inherently understand each other extremely well without needing to speak a whole lot. (Also they're having very similar responses to the situation.)


	19. [embrace]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bonus](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com/post/161277023559/okay-i-promise-this-is-the-last-one-now-that-its) mood board!

Harvey keeps his hand pressed to the small of Mike’s back as though it’s been fastened there with pins and adhesive, and Mike’s arms hang stiffly by his sides as he tells himself it would be inappropriate to return the gesture even though he really, really wants to. It helps that he really, really doesn’t want to try to explain to anyone else what’s going on, what’s just happened, which he would almost definitely have to do if they emerged from the interview room suddenly clinging to each other, a pair of old photographs left stacked in the album for too long, and he doesn’t think Harvey wants to do that, either.

“Donna,” Harvey says as they step out into the hall. A couple of the other applicants look up suspiciously at the sound of his voice, one guy already packing his bag and looking crestfallen, and the woman who offered Mike a coffee or a bottle of water raises her wide, inquisitive eyes.

Mike looks between them, and the woman arches her eyebrows.

“Okay,” she says, a little surprised, a little impressed. “Do you need me to call Jessica?”

Harvey smiles. “Already taken care of. Go on and take the rest of the day to yourself.”

She glances at Mike, and he tries not to fidget.

“You got it,” she agrees eventually, gathering the papers spread out before her and sorting them into a small pile and a large one, “us” and “them.” “Let me just take care of all this first and then I’ll let the event coordinator know we’re finished.”

“You’re the best.”

Her grin turns sharklike as she stands to address the remaining candidates, and Mike knows he ought to feel at least a little bad for them with how this all played out, but on the other hand, he can’t narrow his focus into putting in the effort, so. Never mind.

In the elevator, he has the fleeting thought that it might be nice to kiss Harvey, but there are cameras on the ceiling and it isn’t a long ride.

In the lobby, he wonders if those cops are still scouring the halls for him, but Harvey has this sort of aura that keeps people from stopping him and Mike is clearly under his purview.

Out the front doors, Harvey guides him to an idling town car, nodding to the guy holding the back door open and then sliding in, and Mike wonders if anyone who saw them thinks he’s a rent boy.

He waits until they’ve rounded the corner onto Fifth before he turns to Harvey, who’s already watching him as casually as though he’s been doing it all his life, as enthralled as through he’s never truly seen him before.

_We’ve got time._

(You’re damn right we do.)

Mike smiles, easy as anything, and Harvey reaches to grasp his hand where it sits on his thigh, curled into a loose fist.

(Yes, thank you.)

Everything seems different, although it’s difficult to explain why. The world and all that surrounds them looks the same as it did an hour ago, so that’s not it; it hasn’t even started to rain or anything. But there’s something.

“Do you believe in destiny?” Mike asks, looking down at their hands lying on his thigh. Harvey fits his thumb under Mike’s fingers and they hold hands like children.

There might’ve been a time when the answer was “yes”; might’ve been a time when the answer was “I’ve been searching for my destiny my whole life,” or something with the same basic meaning but better elocution. It crosses his mind, sometimes, but then he reminds himself that everything is random, everyone is arbitrarily flinging themselves, or being flung, through space and time and getting the outcome that they get, lucky or not, to do with as they please.

The past dictates the future, not the other way around, et cetera, et cetera.

“I believe in you and me,” he says, which is still pretty saccharine, but that’s okay. “Whatever you want to call that. I believe in us.”

Mike uncurls his fist and stretches his fingers out to thread them with Harvey’s. “You don’t know me.”

“No, I don’t.”

What that really means, of course, is “I don’t know you any better than you know me,” which means, of course, “I know you better than anyone ever could,” which doesn’t make any sense at all but can’t be anything but the truth. Mike laughs under his breath, and Harvey smiles.

“This is weird,” Mike mutters, which is pretty accurate assessment, if not a wild understatement.

“I believe in taking risks,” Harvey says, even though this is anything but a gamble.

As they turn from fortieth onto Lexington, about halfway back to Harvey’s place, Mike reaches his free hand over to touch the pulse point right under Harvey’s jawline. Harvey turns toward him inquiringly and Mike leans in for a kiss, gentle but without hesitation.

After awhile, Mike draws back, and Harvey clasps their hands together a little tighter.

_Finally._

Curling his fingers under Mike’s chin, Harvey tilts his face so that their eyes meet and draws him forward again, pausing just a moment to smile keenly before he angles his head to the left and responds in kind, just a bit firmer, a touch reassuring.

_Finally._

The rest of the drive passes in silence as they immerse themselves in the moment and all across the recorded history of time, imagining snatches of the hours and hours of conversation ahead of them, the stories and the confidences and the questions and answers and laughter and tears and filling in the blanks, the hollowness that’s been a part of life for as long as either of them can remember. Harvey strokes his thumb over Mike’s knuckles while he waits, and Mike turns his palm up to fit their hands together more comfortably.

When the car stops in front of Harvey’s building, Mike stares at it until Harvey climbs out, looking back with some confusion as though Mike should already be familiar with this place. He isn’t, of course, nor does he have any reason to be, but he follows suit and they walk through the front door with their shoulders pressed together, and that’s good too.

They make their way to a smallish elevator that has a keypad instead of a control panel and ride all the way to the top floor in silence, taking up about half as much space as two grown men ought.

“Whoa,” Mike murmurs when the door opens. For a second, Harvey remembers how proud he was to move out of his halfway-there apartment, the one after the shitty post-collegiate walkup but before this castle where he was always meant to end up, and for a second everything is shiny and new again but stronger, better, brighter, amazing.

Mike walks slowly to the wall of windows leading out to the patio and this is the part where Harvey is supposed to pour a couple of glasses of scotch, straighten his cuffs, and defend his title as “Best Closer in New York.”

Today really isn’t a “supposed to” sort of day.

Today he leaves Mike to admire the view as he goes to the bedroom, hanging his suit jacket in the closet and taking off his shoes, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt and rolling the sleeves to his elbows. Today, he retreats back in the living room and stops at the top of the steps at end of the hall to admire the view.

“You’ve really made something of yourself,” Mike says as he touches the tips of his fingers to the glass. Harvey has an impulse to say “Thank you,” except that what he means isn’t “Thank you for the compliment,” which was actually a pretty brazen thing to say to a man he’s just met, but “Thank you for all your help,” which doesn’t make any sense, so he stops himself from saying it at all.

“I have,” he agrees instead, walking down the steps and toward the couch. Mike turns and follows along, running his palm down the soft black leather and tracing the seams of the seat cushions as he sits carefully.

“You weren’t at the hotel for the interviews,” Harvey ventures, and Mike shakes his head.

“Drug deal gone south,” he says. Harvey narrows his eyes, and Mike laughs.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.” He gestures to the cheap briefcase left on the floor back by the elevator, and Harvey eyes the flimsy clasps disdainfully. “Eighteen ounces of pot. My friend Trevor promised me twenty-five grand to make the drop for him, but when I got to the room where it was supposed to happen, there were a couple of cops there doing a pretty shitty job trying to pull off a sting, so I ran.”

At the sound of Trevor’s name, Harvey’s stomach tightens in a way that feels like revulsion and he knows, he _knows_ that he needs to get rid of him, knows he’s a lead weight and a vicious parasite, a childish thing long since outgrown, knows all of that in an instant without knowing how and hopes with all his might that he and Trevor never, ever meet.

What he says is: “How’d you figure that out?”

Mike shrugs. “Their disguises weren’t great; one of them still had his gun on him, right on his belt, and the whole scene was playing out exactly like this novel I read when I was in elementary school, so I did what the guy in the book did, I asked them what time it was and just kept walking.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, until I got to the stairs. Then I started running.”

Resting his elbow on the backrest, Harvey leans his head in his hand and smiles. The world is fucking spectacular.

“You’re insane.”

Mike smiles back. “It’s very comfortable.”

To be fair, when he woke up this morning, Harvey didn’t plan to bring his new associate home with him, and when he escorted Mike to the backseat of his car to bring him home, he didn’t plan to kiss him, and when he kissed him as they drove down Lexington, he didn’t plan to do it again, but if this kid isn’t everything Harvey needs, he’s at least everything he’s been searching for, so he pushes himself a little closer and he cups Mike’s face in his hands and he kisses him like he’s been wanting to do his whole life, even if he didn’t exactly know it. For his part, Mike sinks into it like he’s been waiting just as long for exactly the same, and Harvey’s tempted to apologize, even though he can’t think of precisely what he should apologize for.

_You and me._

Mike wraps his arms around Harvey’s neck and clings to him in a way that makes Harvey wonder how long the poor kid’s been starved, or been starving himself, for honest-to-god affection, love just for the sake of it without any strings or sordid history attached. The arbitrary universe might’ve done right putting them in each other’s paths, but he’s willing to bet it wasn’t doing Mike a whole lot of favors before that.

“Mike,” Harvey says, skating his fingers idly up and down Mike’s spine until he leans back to look Harvey in the eye. “Mike, why would you do something so stupid?”

After a second, Mike smirks. “I believe in taking risks.”

“Mike.”

Lowering his gaze, dropping his façade, Mike’s smirk morphs into a grimace and he takes a shallow breath, and Harvey withdraws his hands to let him collect himself in his own time.

“It’s my grandmother,” he admits lowly, and Harvey thinks _God no,_ and Harvey thinks _I should have known,_ and he remembers that the world is fucking spectacular in some ways and a goddamn disaster in a lot of others.

“She’s sick,” he explains, “and she’s getting worse, and if I can’t pay for her treatment, her nursing home will kick her out and I’ll have to put her in a state facility.”

Harvey shakes his head. You can’t.

I can’t.

We can’t.

Twenty-five grand is nothing, a drop in the bucket, but Harvey remembers what it’s like. Living paycheck to paycheck, budgeting everything, every day down to the dollar, to the cent, waiting on that big break that’s gotta be coming up soon, wishing for someone to give him the shot he deserves, the shot he’s earned. Harvey remembers.

Mike deserves that shot, and Harvey’s earned the opportunity to give it to him, and maybe they should’ve done more, maybe Harvey should’ve done more, even though he doesn’t know what, or when, or how, but come hell or high water, they’re gonna do it right this time.

“This is hard work,” Harvey says. “High pressure. Long hours, in the no-time-to-spend-with-family sense.”

Mike clears his throat and nods, keeping his eyes on Harvey’s.

“Yeah,” he says, “well, you know, young people have it too easy these days anyway.”

It hits hard, harder than he’d expect, anger piercing him right in the heart on top of some kind of weird mourning, some kind of ill-fitting regret, some kind of missed opportunity. And it’s bullshit, it’s total bullshit.

Harvey grips Mike’s chin and holds him steady, even though Mike doesn’t seem too interested in looking away.

“I mean it,” he warns. “This isn’t the life you think it is, and I know that because I stood where you’re standing right now and I thought I knew what I was getting into, same as you do, and I didn’t, and I’ll tell you right now that if you’re gonna make it here, you’re gonna have to be ready to fight for it with everything you have.”

Taking ahold of Harvey’s wrist, Mike’s expression goes sort of cold, sort of rigid.

_Give it to me straight._

“Ever since I got knocked out of this life,” he says, “I’ve been looking for a way back into it.”

His eyes have an uncommon sort of resoluteness, and if the next words out of his mouth were that from now on left was right and up was down, Harvey would believe it.

“And I promise,” he says, “I _promise_ I won’t fuck this up for you. I will work as hard as it takes, and I’ll become the best lawyer you have ever _seen._ ”

Damn right he will. Mike is a survivor, one tough son of a bitch, and he’s good at what he does.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that hiring him is a stupidly illegal move. It’s a massive betrayal of everything Harvey believes in, everything he’s fought for and everything that’s made him who he is. It’s dangerous as fuck and promises to drag down a hell of a lot more people than just the two of them when it inevitably blows up in their faces.

“You start a week from Monday.”

Like it’s really a tough choice.

These are the chances we’ve waited a lifetime for. These are the choices we make, and these are the risks worth taking.

Carefully, Mike cradles Harvey’s face in his hands and leans in to kiss him again, intimate and tender, and everything about all of this is completely insane, and Harvey doesn’t think he’s ever felt more loved in his entire life.

“Who are you?” Mike murmurs, and Harvey smiles at him. Someone different from the man he was this morning, that’s for sure, as he suspects Mike is, too; they’ll figure out the answer together, in time.

Today is a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Chilton Hotel (not a real hotel) is for these purposes the [West 57th Street by Hilton Club](http://www3.hilton.com/en/hotels/new-york/west-57th-street-by-hilton-club-NYCWEGV/index.html), because there’s a [New York Health and Racquet Club](http://nyhrc.com/club/56th-street/) on 56th street (the closest approximation to the Metropolitan Health and Racquet Club, which is not a real club) and all I know for sure is that the Chilton is around 55th street. As a point of reference, it’s about a half hour drive from there to 25 Cooper Square, a.k.a. [The Standard Hotel](http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york/properties/east-village), a.k.a. Harvey’s penthouse.
> 
> “It’s more comfortable for you to label me as insane.”  
> “It’s very comfortable.”  
> —John Doe and David Mills, _Se7en_ (1995)
> 
> “I lost my scholarship, I got kicked out of school, I I got knocked into a different life. And I have been wishing for a way back ever since.”  
> “Let me tell you something. This isn't elementary school. This is hard work. Long hours. High pressure. I need a grown goddamn man.”  
> “You give me this, and I will work as hard as it takes to school those Harvard douches and become the best lawyer you have ever seen.”  
> —Mike and Harvey, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> “You’re going to start a week from Monday.”  
> —Harvey, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> There are a bunch of callbacks to the main fic scattered throughout the epilogue, so if you think you see a familiar line, it’s probably intentional.


End file.
